Give Us a King Like Everyone Else

The holy box had come home on its cow cart years ago, and the boy Samuel had grown into an old man with a long white beard. All his life he had judged Israel. (A judge in those days had no courtroom. He settled arguments and called the people back to God whenever they wandered.)

Now Samuel made his two sons, Joel and Abijah, judges in his place. It went badly. The sons loved money more than fairness. Bring them a bag of silver, and they would decide the case your way, whether you were right or wrong.

One day all the leaders of Israel came up the road to Samuel's house in Ramah together, a whole crowd of gray beards and walking sticks.

"You are old," they told him, "and your sons do not walk in your ways. Give us a king to lead us, like all the other nations have!"

Samuel's face went hard. He went off alone and prayed.

"Listen to the people," God told him. "It is not you they have rejected. They have rejected me as their king." Ever since the day he brought them out of Egypt, God said, they had been leaving him for other gods, and now they were doing the same to Samuel. "So do what they ask. But warn them first. Tell them what a king will do to them."

So Samuel stood up in front of the crowd.

"Here is what your king will do," he said. "He will take your sons to drive his chariots and run in front of his horses. He will take them to plow his fields and bring in his harvest and hammer out his swords. He will take your daughters to cook and bake for him and mix his perfumes. He will take your best vineyards and olive trees and hand them to his friends. He will take a tenth of your grain and a tenth of your sheep. He will take your servants and your donkeys. And you yourselves will be his servants!"

(If you were counting, that is a great deal of taking. Samuel wanted them to hear it.)

"And on that day," Samuel said, "you will cry out because of the king you chose for yourselves. But the LORD will not answer you."

For a moment nobody moved. Then the shouting started.

"No! We want a king over us! Then we will be like all the other nations. Our king will lead us and march out in front of us and fight our battles!"

(Years before, God had thundered at the Philistines and sent them running, with no king at all. Somehow the people had forgotten.)

Samuel carried every word back to God, and God said, "Listen to them. Give them a king."

"Go home," Samuel told the crowd, and off they went to wait for their king.

Samuel's warning came true. Kings took sons for their armies and grain for their storehouses, and even the good ones went wrong. Still the prophets promised a King of God's own choosing.

At last, one spring day, another King rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. He took no one's fields and no one's sons. "I did not come to be served," he had told his friends, "but to serve, and to give my life for many." He went out in front of his people, the way they had asked a king to do, and fought the enemies no king could beat: sin, and death itself.

When a Roman governor asked, "Shall I crucify your King?" the chief priests shouted the same old cry: "We have no king but Caesar!"

Jesus, the King who gives, died on a cross for the people who had rejected him. On the third day he rose again, and he is King still.