When We Get What We Want, Outside Of God’s Will, We Get What We Deserve
Word-Of-The-Day: ‘(6) But when <the Israelite elders> said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. (7) And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.”… (18) When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”’ (1 Samuel 8:6-7, 18)
Following up on yesterday’s message, in 1 Samuel 8 something similar happened as what we are seeing today. We see that the people of Israel were not looking at things through the eyes of God, but the eyes of ‘self’. God Himself was the King of Israel, and His Righteous ways were what they needed long-term. However, the Israelites were only looking at the short-term, to replace Samuel’s sons with ‘something better’ in leadership. Instead of turning to God to address the issue of governance, they went to Samuel and demanded a ‘king’. God, through Samuel, told the Israelites that they would not be liking this decision; kings want to be obeyed, and people, with free will, don’t always want to cooperate. What is Good and Righteous is based on facts and are not always as appealing as the feeling of wants.
God even warned them, in 1 Samuel 8:18, that once this decision is made, there would be no turning back; God told the Israelites that they would have to live with their decision, giving them every reason why they weren’t going to like having an earthly king, and yet they pushed until they got their wish. The adage, ‘be careful what you wish for, you may just get it’ in this case was spot on; the Israelites got Saul as their first earthly king, which led to a string of others, a few were good and Righteous but most were corrupt and without God; all made mistakes that hurt themselves and the people. The Israelites got the government they wanted, and got the government they deserved – they wanted leadership without God, they got it – and thus deserved all that which befell them.
We in the US are in the same dilemma; we (corporately as a nation) want rules that flout laws; we have ‘defund the police’, ‘catch and release’, open borders, inflation, and energy dependence because this is what we (corporately) have voted for. These are not in line with what God wants for us; peace, security, free will with an adherence to both His law and man’s law. We Christians may not be necessarily to blame for the mess we’re in but we have the responsibility to ‘clean it up’. We must start within ourselves, we need to ensure Jesus is our King first, then press on His precepts being in place so He rules over us.
