ACTS BIBLE
From Judges to the Temple's Fall week 3 · 1 Samuel 8; 1 Samuel 15:10-23
Israel asks for a king like all the nations, and God says plainly whom they have rejected. Saul gets the crown and loses it over a spared king and a flock.
Samuel is old, and his sons are taking bribes and perverting judgment. The elders of Israel come to him at Ramah and ask for something that sounds sensible: make us a king to judge us like all the nations (1 Samuel 8:5).
They had their reasons. Samuel's sons were unfit to follow him. The Philistines had iron weapons and a standing army, and Israel had lost the ark to them in battle not long before (1 Samuel 4). Deuteronomy 17:14-20 had even foreseen the day Israel would want a king and laid down rules for him. Nothing in the law forbade it. Why, then, does the request displease Samuel, and why does God take it as he does?
God tells Samuel, they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them (1 Samuel 8:7). The trouble is in the last words of their request, like all the nations. Israel had been called out to be unlike the nations. The elders wanted a king who would go out before them and fight their battles (verse 20), when that is what the LORD had been doing for them since the Red Sea.
So God has Samuel warn them, and the warning in verses 11-17 keeps coming back to one verb. This king will take your sons for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be his cooks and bakers. He will take your fields and your vineyards, and a tenth of your seed and of your sheep. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day (1 Samuel 8:18). They hear all of it and answer, Nay; but we will have a king over us.
It came true in every particular. Solomon's forced labor and heavy taxes split the kingdom (1 Kings 12:4). Kings who were supposed to fight Israel's battles led Israel to Baal instead. Of the nineteen kings who ruled the northern kingdom, the Bible does not call one of them good.
God gives them their king: a man a head taller than anyone else in Israel, from a good Benjamite family, every inch of him royal to look at. Saul begins modestly enough. Then, early in his reign, with the Philistines gathering and his men slipping away, he offers the sacrifice himself rather than wait for Samuel. Later he is sent to destroy Amalek and spares King Agag and the best of the flocks, sets up a monument to himself at Carmel, and greets Samuel with the words, I have performed the commandment of the LORD.
Samuel answers him: Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams (1 Samuel 15:22). Saul had kept the outward forms and watched the crowd. He admits as much: I feared the people, and obeyed their voice (1 Samuel 15:24). That is a king like all the nations, which is what they had asked for.
God did not give up on the people who had set him aside. He gave them next a king after his own heart, and in the fullness of time he sent, through that king's line, the King himself. When that King stood bound before a crowd in Jerusalem, the request of 1 Samuel 8 was made one last time: We have no king but Caesar (John 19:15).
1 Samuel 8 is not finally about forms of government. It asks whom you trust to go out before you and fight your battles. Christ is a king who does not take from his people. He gave himself for them, having lived the obedience Saul would not, and his one sacrifice has done what all the fat of rams could not.