Give us A king
1 Samuel 9-10
Main Idea: The Lord prepares His people to receive the King they really need by allowing them to have the king they think they want.
I. The Kind of King They Wanted
It is clear from everything leading up to these donkey’s going missing that a “king like the nations around them” was the perceived solution to a set of national problems Israel was facing.
When they looked at their “problem,” they saw that the system was broken beyond repair. It needed to be replaced with a better solution, namely, a king like all the nations around them.
The solutions we demand from God and others match the characteristics of the problems we are most recently experiencing.
Set in the context of this story, the kind of “king” we want solves the problem we think we have. But the problem we think we have may not be our biggest problem or even our root problem.
Without ever intending to get there, we find ourselves stalled and stuck in a pattern of reactive “problem-solving” that only creates more and more problems for us.
II. How They Got the King They Got
On the surface, the story of how King Saul came to be king is strange and confusing. It is definitely not your typical “founding father of the nation” kind of story. It is actually more like a comedy than a drama.
1 Samuel 10:1-2: Then Samuel took a flask of oil and poured it on his head and kissed him and said, “Has not the Lord anointed you to be prince over his people Israel? And you shall reign over the people of the Lord and you will save them from the hand of their surrounding enemies. And this shall be the sign to you that the Lord has anointed you to be prince over his heritage.
There is no question that the Lord is behind all the strange and confusing events that play out in this story. This is the universal and absolute story of the Bible.
Nothing happens of which the Lord is not completely aware and over which He does not exercise complete and sovereign power.
No one involved in what happens under the Lord’s rule is coerced to do anything against their own wishes or inclinations.
Anyone who fails to consider life in all of its complexity outside the lens of the Lord’s sovereignty will run into futility and failure time and time again.
What is the Lord trying to do when he allows problems into our lives that cause more brokenness than the brokenness we are already experiencing?
The Lord did what He did in relation to Saul and the kingdom because Israel was His people, His heritage. His people had rejected Him from being king over them, but in the most beautiful yet subtle of ways the Lord is saying through this brokenness he allows, “Though you have rejected Me, I will not ever break my promise to you. You just can’t see that yet.”
III. The King We Really Need
The kind of King the Israelites failed to see they needed was actually the kind of king the nations thought they had. Both were missing the King they really needed because of two different kinds of blindness.
The kings we think we want, they lie and they take life from us.
The King we really need, He died to give us Life and Truth.
The Lord allows us the kings we think we want to prepare us to see the King we really need.
