ACTS BIBLE
The American Church week 9 · 1 Samuel 8
Why judges and not kings. Israel asks for a king and is told what a king takes. The founders read the same list and built against it.
Week one raised four objections and promised to answer them. Two were about men: Jefferson kept a razor, and a good deal of the founding generation held opinions the 1689 Confession would not.1
That question gets answered here, and it gets answered from Scripture rather than from biographies, because the biographies do not settle it either way.
Start where they started.
Samuel is old and his sons are corrupt, so the elders of Israel come to him with a request that sounds reasonable: give us a king to judge us, like all the nations.
Samuel takes it badly, and God tells him why. They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them (1 Samuel 8:7).2
The objection to a king is not that monarchy is an inefficient system. It is that the office is already occupied. Israel is not choosing a form of government; it is firing one ruler and hiring another.
Then God tells Samuel to warn them, and the warning is a list. He will take your sons for his chariots. He will take your daughters. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and your flocks. And you shall be his servants (1 Samuel 8:11-17).2
Six times, take. Then the closing line, which is the part nobody quotes: in that day you will cry out because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the LORD will not answer you in that day (1 Samuel 8:18).2
They asked anyway. God gave them the king.
It is not a prophecy about one bad king. It is a description of what the office does to whoever holds it, which is the same claim Romans 3 makes about every man alive and the same claim the founders built their machinery around.
They knew this chapter, and we do not have to guess, because the most widely read pamphlet of the Revolution argues from it.
Thomas Paine's Common Sense appeared in January 1776 and sold in numbers no American publication had ever reached. Its second section is titled "Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession," and it is, for several pages, straight exposition. Paine cites Gideon refusing the crown, "I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you." He walks through Samuel's warning almost verse by verse. He calls monarchy "the most prosperous invention the Devil ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry."3
That is where the argument came from. Not from a theory of natural rights, in that section, but from Judges and 1 Samuel, put in front of a public that knew the passages.
There is a passage this course has been walking around for eight weeks and it has to be faced here, because these are the men who had to face it.
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed (Romans 13:1-2).4
Paul wrote that under Nero. Not under a mild administration with a tax dispute.
So how does a Christian sign a declaration of independence?
The Loyalist answer was that he does not, and it deserves to be stated by somebody who is not mocking it, because it was held by serious believers. Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican minister in Maryland, preached against the Revolution straight out of Romans 13 and kept pistols on the pulpit cushion while he did it, until he was driven back to England.5 John Wesley published against the colonists in 1775.6 Anglicans and Methodists largely opposed the thing; the British called it the Presbyterian Rebellion for a reason.7 A Christian in 1776 who read Romans 13 and refused to take up arms was not a coward. He was obeying a verse.
The Patriot side gave three answers, and they are not equally strong.
The lesser magistrate. The oldest of the three, and it is Reformation property rather than American invention. Calvin allows in the Institutes that lower magistrates may restrain a tyrant, and the Magdeburg Confession of 1550 worked it into a doctrine when a city's own officials resisted the emperor.8 The colonial legislatures were lower magistrates. On this reading the resistance was led by offices, not by a mob.
The compact was already broken. The Declaration is not a manifesto, it is an indictment: a list of specific acts by which the King is said to have violated the constitutional arrangement first. On this reading the colonists were defending the law against a lawbreaker who happened to wear a crown.
And the exegetical one, which is the strongest and the most dangerous. Read four more verses. Rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad; he is God's servant for your good; he does not bear the sword in vain (Romans 13:3-4).4 Paul is describing what an authority is for, and Jonathan Mayhew preached exactly that in Boston in 1750, twenty-six years early, arguing that unlimited submission is not what the passage teaches.9 John Adams remembered that sermon his whole life.
Say the danger out loud. Every rebel in history has believed his ruler had forfeited the description. The argument that a tyrant is no longer a governing authority can be made by anyone about anyone, which is why the lesser-magistrate version matters: it requires an actual office to act, not a private man with a grievance and a reading.
Where this class lands. Christians who loved the same Bible came down on opposite sides of 1776, and this course is not going to pretend that is settled by a proof text.7 What can be said is narrower and holds. Romans 13 is not a blank cheque, because verses 3 and 4 describe the office. It is also not a licence, because the passage was written about Nero and Paul still said submit. A Christian holding both halves will be slow to rebel and unable to worship a government, which is roughly where this country's best moments have come from.
Now the uncomfortable part, which needs to be exact rather than comfortable.
Were the founders Christians?
Some plainly were. John Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister, the president of Princeton, and he signed the Declaration.10 Most of the signers held membership in Protestant congregations.
Some plainly were not, by any confession a Baptist church would recognize. Jefferson cut the miracles and the resurrection out of his New Testament. John Adams was a Unitarian, holding God to be one person rather than three and denying the deity of Christ. Franklin, writing to Ezra Stiles six weeks before he died, said he had doubts about the divinity of Jesus and thought it needless to busy himself with the question at his age.11
And church membership is not conversion, which is a point Baptist churches make about their own rolls every year. The honest answer to the question is that the generation was mixed, that the mix is checkable, and that no count of it settles anything about whether God was at work.
Which brings us to the man who wrote the pamphlet.
Paine made the biblical case against kings in 1776. Eighteen years later he published The Age of Reason, an attack on revealed religion that called the Bible a book of fables and left him hated on both sides of the Atlantic.12
So the argument that helped separate America from a monarchy, drawn from Judges and 1 Samuel, was put into the country's hands by a man who ended his life attacking the book he had argued from.
If that is a problem, the problem is with a premise we have been carrying without examining it: that God works through believers.
Scripture denies that premise directly, by name, more than once.
Cyrus was a Persian king who worshipped other gods. Isaiah calls him God's shepherd and God's anointed, the word mashiach, and commissions him to rebuild Jerusalem. Then God says it to his face: I call you by your name, though you do not know me (Isaiah 45:4-5).13
Assyria is the rod of my anger, and Isaiah adds the line that settles the question of intent: but he does not so intend, and his heart does not so think (Isaiah 10:5-7).14 The instrument had no idea it was one.
Nebuchadnezzar burned the temple, and the God whose temple it was calls him my servant, twice (Jeremiah 25:9, 27:6).14
Pharaoh is the plainest. For this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power. Paul quotes it and draws the conclusion out loud: he has mercy on whom he wills, and he hardens whom he wills (Romans 9:17-18).15
And the one that ends the argument. The best thing that has ever happened was done by men committing the worst act in history. Peter says both halves in one sentence: this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men (Acts 2:23).16
Jefferson writing that men are endowed by their Creator is the same pattern at a distance, though Isaiah 45 names Cyrus and commissions him, and no text does that for Jefferson.13 It should not surprise anybody who has read Isaiah 45.
This cuts both ways, and the second cut matters more than the first.
None of that makes faith optional or decorative. It makes one specific inference illegal, and the illegal one runs backward: from a good outcome to a faithful man. That is the reasoning Pharaoh disproves, and arguing that the founders must have been believers because the founding was good makes a move Scripture forbids. The first biography anybody reads will embarrass it.
Run it forward and it holds. Men of strong faith are always effective for God's good works in the body. That direction rests on a stated promise rather than on an inference from outcomes: we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10), and apart from him we can do nothing (John 15:5).17
The hardened man and the son serve the same purpose and do not end in the same place. Pharaoh served it and was destroyed by it. A son serves it and is conformed by it. Faith is not the lever you pull to make God accomplish something. It is how you end up on the right side of what he is accomplishing anyway.
Israel asked for a king because the seat looked empty. It was not, and the answer to 1 Samuel 8 is not a better system of government. It is a better king, and he came.
Every human ruler on that list takes. He gave. He did not take your sons; he gave his own life, and took it up again. He lived the perfect life we could not live and then went to the cross, and the debt was paid in full with nothing left for us to add.
That is why Scripture stays our final authority over every founding document, including the ones we admire, and why we can say plainly that men who wrote true sentences about liberty also held slaves. God chooses and the Father draws, and salvation is his work from start to finish. We receive it; we don't author it. The generation that wrote the Declaration could no more author it than we can.
"take" appears in the warning.
reached for first.
either.
when they insisted. What does that tell us about how God answers a people's demands?
change what the argument in Common Sense was worth?
forbidden, where else do we do it without noticing?
Next class: Washington, and what can honestly be said about the interior life of a man two centuries dead.