Being Like David: The Prequel; "How it all Began"

1 Samuel 8:1-20, 11:15-16 Every person’s story has a beginning. We like to think that most people stories begin with their birthday, but the fact of the matter, is that events that will shape the whole of their lives often are things that happen terciaryily to any given person’s life. The story of David begins here in the passage I just read, well, we can only guess that if these events had not happened David would still have had a story, but it would have gone quite differently. You see in order for David to really enter the historical scene, Saul and the Israelite armies have to be camped at Ephes-dammim so that David can, at a fairly young age, journey there and defeat Goliath, thus catapulting him into the public eye and beginning the journey that would eventually lead him to not only be the one truly great king Israel ever has, but lead him to be the spiritual leader we know. Before he is coroneted, before Saul tries to kill him, before Goliath, before Samuel can anoint him king, before God can get fed up with Saul, the people of Israel have depose God as their sole leader and demand to be ruled by a king. Every good story must begin somewhere, and this right here is where it begins. This is the prequel event that leads to all the good stuff that will one day be the story of David. This is the one event without which David’s life would not have been what it will one day become. So as we look at David we begin here, with this prequel story. We begin here so we know why it is that Israel, a nation, a different kind of nation, with a different kind of God. God had come to the Hebrew people when they were but slaves, working for the Pharaohs dieing for the Pharaohs and suffering all along the way. God brought them up out of Egypt, up out of the land of slavery and took them to Sinai where God pledged to be their God, to lead them to a land that would be their own, to help them conquer the people who lived there, defeat them and give the land over to them. God promised to protect them, to guide and to be their God and they promised to be God’s people; they would live as God called them to live, to live by God’s laws and God’s ordinances, to love and obey God in all things. God was to rule over them and they were to be God’s people. God would give them human leaders whom God would show how to lead and to guide them. God had given them Moses and Joshua, and then the judges Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Samson and now Samuel. God had never left them alone, had never disappointed or failed to be anything less than the ruler God had promised to be, but this was not enough. They are displeased. Samuel’s sons are not proving to be very wise and so the elders, gather together have themselves a little meeting and decide what they want. Perhaps they gather at the goading of the people of Israel, perhaps not, we don’t know. We just know they meet and come up with a plan. They decide what will be best for them, what will be best for the people. Up until this point this has been God’s job, the deciding what is best, but the elders don’t think that things are going to work out the way they want them to, so they decide to take control and they want things to be done their way. They want a king. Now what is a king, but a Pharaoh by a different name? They ran away from Pharaoh, because living in Egypt under a pharaoh was not working out so well for them. They did not like it very much. But learning from the past is not Israel’s strong suit, they want a king, they want a king so instead of being different, instead of being ruled by God they can be ruled by a king. They want to be just like ever one else, being different is hard, they don’t like it. So they come to Samuel with their plan. They want a king; go tell God that they want a king. Notice they don’t care to tell God themselves. They send God’s messenger to go do their dirty work for them. I mean nobody wants to stand before a king and tell him that his people are deposing him as their ruler; you better bet that nobody really wants to be the idiot who goes before God and tells God that God’s own people are deposing him as their ruler. They still want him as God, but God and king should be separate. God, we will let you be God, but we don’t want you to rule us any more, we want to rule ourselves (yeah, because ruling yourselves is what having a king is all about). Samuel is a little more than miffed on God’s behalf. He sees what this is all about. They don’t trust God anymore. They are not willing to live up to their side of the covenant. They don’t like the arrangement they have made with God so they are choosing to alter it, for their convenience and they want God to agree and go along with it. So Samuel take’s their “plea” to God, fully expecting God to laugh in their faces and say, “No.” But that is not what God does. God says, “Yeah, sure, you can have a king, have all the kings you want. But I warn you this; will not; work well for you. Kings don’t work for you, you work for the king. Kings don’t rule for you, kings’ rule for themselves, to uphold and protect their power over you and will do everything they need to do to extend their power to make it greater. You may think that having a powerful king will make you look like a powerful nation, but having a powerful king will mean that you live and die to serve that power, to strengthen and ensure that power. Kings take your sons, they take your daughters, they take the best of your land, the best of your fruit, the best of your crops, the best of your animals and force you to work on their behalf. I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of slavery and because you request it, because you demand it, because you truly believe this is what you want, I will allow you to be slaves once again, because a nation with a king is a nation of slaves.” So Samuel goes back to the people and tells them all that God has told him. He explains to them in no uncertain terms how bad a king will be and how miserable their lives will be. And the people listen and cry out in a united voice, “Oh no don’t allow that to happen to us, we like things just the way they are!” No, they insist that God give them a king. Hang the consequences. They know that if God chooses the king, their king will be good. Their king will not be wooed by power and will not lord it over them, like the kings of all the countries they want to be like. Their king will be different. They just know it; besides a king is good when you got to go battle all those other nations with kings. They want a king, so God gives them Saul, well you know he was a great and awesome king, if you like kings who are narcissistic mad men who like to throw spears at their musicians, and decide that falling on their own sword is the good and proper way to end a loosing battle. And because Saul fails so miserably at being anything close to a good king, David becomes king after him and succeeds where Saul fails, and is the one king who truly lives up to the expectations the people has for a king. He is one of very few exceptions in a long list of kings who live up to the picture a King God paints here for Israel. It is sad to say, but the greatness of David, is rooted here in this horrible story of Israel’s rejection of dependence up on God for all things and in all things. Israel deposes God as their ruler, because they don’t trust God to be who God says God will be. They reject the kind of leadership God has been giving to them. They don’t like not knowing who will lead them. They don’t like not completely understanding how this system works. They don’t want God to lead them. They don’t like being different than the world around them. They want the nations around them to accept them and see them as equals, and they think they know how to do that. If they have a king, just like the other nations have kings, the nations will respect them. If they have a great and mighty king to lead them into battle these other nations will see that king and tremble and leave them alone. They know how the world works. They know how people think. God does not understand. God is all about being God. God lives in the heavens, where gods live and does not really understand how things work down here. Down here it is not good to have an unseen ruler, an intangible force with whom the other nations must recon. God does not understand, but they do. They need things to be the way they think they need to be and God needs to listen to them and do things their way. Their ways are the ways of the world, and God’s ways are well just God’s ways, they don’t work here on earth in the real world. Now don’t get me wrong trust is hard. We live in a world of empirical data. We need to be able to touch, see, taste and prove what we know, in order to trust that it is true. If an experiment can’t be set up to prove that something is so and that experiment be replicated by many people in different places at different times then it is not true, it has not been proven to be true. We have a hard time trusting what we can not see, touch, smell, and prove to be true. My professor in seminary, as part of some illustration, told us about these straw bridges (as in bridges made from straw, you know the part of the wheat shaft you don’t eat, the stuff you make cow beds out of) he had seen on his journeys in some jungle land. He showed us a picture of a man leading a heavily laden donkey across one. Let me tell you something I don’t really believe in them. I have never seen one, I have never touched one and really I have only ever seen that one picture of one. I mean I logically can tell you that this professor is trust worthy and am pretty sure he would not make something up just to make point to us in class. But I do not really believe these things exist. I mean seriously a bridge made out of straw? How do I know this thing really exists somewhere out there in some unnamed jungle in some unknown part of the world? Ok, let’s say it does exist, somewhere in some deep dark jungle there is a straw bridge. For the sake of argument; I mean after all I do trust this professor, he has no reason to lie to us, and he did have a picture of one after all, so they must exist somewhere, right? But would I trust it? Would I step out on the bridge with some indefinably deep chasm below me and trust that it will hold me up. NO. I know for a fact I won’t. I know this because I know I have a hard time trusting things I know will hold my weight when that weight is slung our over say a 150 foot pit. In the time BC, Before Children, Mike and I went caving. That was our hobby. Now there is caving, which involves crawling around in various sized holes in the ground for fun and enjoyment and then there is vertical caving which is doing the former but when there is a rope and a pit involved at some point in the process. In order be able to go vertical caving the first time you have to practice and have to have spent so many hours “on rope” before you stick yourself out over a 150 foot pit and drop. The day I dropped down my first pit, two grown men (who each weighed at least 200 lbs) and Mike went down the same rope I was going down, before I did. But when it was my turn it took me 15 minutes (at least) to convince myself that when I stepped off the lip of that hole that the rope would indeed hold my weight and I would not plummet to bottom of that hole and die. This is why I know if ever faced with a straw bridge I would not be able to easily trust it. I don’t care how many donkeys carrying men and packs that weight three, four times what I weigh, just crossed that bridge. I would be frightened, scared half out of my wits to step foot on that bridge. I would really have a hard time trusting it. Assuming I am in that jungle and watched those donkeys and those men cross that bridge. I would have seen that the bridge was trust worthy. But it would still be hard, just as hard if not harder than trusting my weight to that rope and depending on it to keep me from falling to my death. So I understand the Israelites’ position here. Trusting and depending upon things we do see, do know and do understand is hard enough. Trusting in an unseen, unheard, unfathomable, hard to understand God is even harder. Trusting God is hard. There is no way to lay hands on God. God can not be seen. God can not be touched, tasted, smelled. There is no certifiable way to prove God even exists; there is no experiment you can set up that will prove that God is, much less can be trusted and depended upon to do the things that scriptures tell us God will do. Yet we are expected to do just this, trust God, depend on God. To believe what the scripture tell us about God is true. Trust in the unseen, believe in the unknown, depend up on the untouchable. This faith stuff is not easy. It is not a given. It is foolishness by all standards. We live in a world that believes in what it can seen, touched, tasted, heard and proved. We believe in a God who can not be known in any of these ways. We can want God to be different. We can insist on having a God that is seen, that is touched, that is tasted, heard and proved, but we would be doing just what the Israelites are doing here. We want God to be what we can understand. We want what we know we need, so that we can live in a world that functions and lives by a different set of rules. God needs to understand that, God needs to learn to function in ways that make sense to us and to the people of our world. We can depose God in our own lives in our own ways. We can choose to not trust God to be the God, to be the God says God is, or we can step out on faith, look at that bridge and start walking, look at that hole, lean out over it and trust that rope to do what you know it will do, hold your weight and allow you to do what you need to do to slowly be lowered safely to the bottom. Trusting God is not easy. Trusting is hard. But trusting is exactly what we are called to do; to believe, to trust, to depend on God, to be who God says God will be, to do what God says God will do, that God will be God in all things at all times. Period.