And He Shall be Called Immanuel
Wednesday (September (24)
And He Shall be Called Immanuel
1 Samuel 8:19-20
But the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No! But there shall be a king over us, 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.”
These people are both right and wrong in their motives here. Right in the sense that their desire for a king to judge them and go out before them and fight their battles is certainly a God-given one, but wrong in the sense that they just want to fit in with all the other nations, when, from the beginning, Almighty God has set them apart.
Nevertheless, the human heart wants more than a king in all his regalia to rule with a golden crown and an iron scepter. The sheen of that spectacle will wear off real quick. After a while, Pharaohs claiming to be sons of gods and Caesars burning the world down in their domination and autocrats dropping bombs on their neighbors won’t lead to societal flourishing but to the cry of oppressed masses just as Samuel warned in the previous verse. The human heart desires the pomp and circumstance, and a king who sits higher and stands taller and fights harder than all the rest of us, but that King still needs to be one of us, a brother of brothers, a Man Who understands our poverty—which is why we love rags-to-riches stories—Who speaks our common tongue, and Who’s fought beside us in the trenches of a fallen world.
Let me translate what these unbelieving Israelites mean to say to Samuel here: “Yes, Almighty God is our King, but He isn’t in our shoes; He’s our Shepherd through laws and pillars of cloud and sacred ceremony but He isn’t in our wool. He’s been judging us and going before us and fighting our battles, but He isn’t on our level, or a brother from among our own people, nor does He have a face we can look at or a hand we can reach out and grasp. Oh, if only God could incarnate into our flesh and blood! If only He could wear our skin and our sorrow and our suffering! Then He would wear the crown like no one else!”
What they needed was a King for all nations, not a king like all nations.