Warning signs

This morning we're taking a look at 1st Samuel chapter 8. 1st Samuel chapter 8. We've been working through our series on the book of 1 Samuel, and I'm once again going to pick up and read the whole story. The book of 1 Samuel is a fantastic book, and there's so many great, rich stories that come forth from this book. So I really love to just sort of draw these out and draw us into the text.

1st Samuel 8:1:

"When Samuel became old, he made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second was Abijah; they were judges in Beersheba. Yet his sons did not walk in his ways, but turned aside after gain. They took bribes and perverted justice.Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, 'Behold, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.' But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, 'Give us a king to judge us.' And Samuel prayed to the Lord.And the Lord said to Samuel, 'Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. According to all the deeds that they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.'So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, 'These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.'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.'And when Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, 'Obey their voice and make them a king.' Samuel then said to the men of Israel, 'Go every man to his city.'"

Good intentions

One of the things that really stood out to me as I'm reading this text is ultimately this story begins with a good desire. They want justice in the land. They want to see right, and Samuel's sons are not doing that. So there's the right intentions.

But what we find as we look at the text, there are clues and warning signs that begin to tell us that this is not a good decision, and that there are red flags. The way that I sort of frame this is I wanted to look at this story this morning and pull out some of these warning signs, because it's really about intentions. When the intentions of life—we can start with good intentions, but they can lead to destruction; that can go wrong in our life. So this is a story about warning signs in life and where good intentions go wrong. As we look today, we can see several of these that come to the surface.

We all have good intentions in life. I was recently listening to a story among a group of men about one of the guys in the group. He was asking for prayer, and he was talking about how—and this is not related to a church setting or anything like that—the gentleman in this group was saying, "I need prayer and wisdom, because every so often, every few months, I have this daughter, she lives out in California, she's in her 30s, and she will call me just out of the blue and say she needs money." He's like, "This has sort of become a cycle where every few months I'll just hear from her. I'm not even sure exactly where she's at in California, I'm not sure why she needs the money. She usually says she has an emergency, something's come up, and so she needs it." He was praying for wisdom.

What's been happening over the course of years is he said, "I just feel like I was always giving money. I'm not really sure what it's being used for or where it's going." A lot of us in the group are sitting thinking, the intentions of this gentleman are good, right? We want to help our kids, and we don't know all the circumstances, and he doesn't either—he's praying for wisdom in this moment. But sometimes in those good intentions, he may also be giving unknowingly and enabling a way of life where his daughter could be using this in all sorts of different ways. She's in her 30s at this point in life and seemingly having every few months these emergencies coming up.

So there are these warning signs, these warning flags that maybe he should read and think about: are there better or wiser ways for me to go about this? Maybe she needs to come and live with us for a season if she's having an emergency; something might need to change in her life. But in the midst of that, he has these good intentions, but some of it can lead to tragedy—it could lead to her tragedy, because her way of life could be destroyed. Now, I don't know all the things about it, but in that same way, we see the elders today starting with good intentions, but going awry along the way. So what are these?

Making a big decision without God

The first one I want to call out for us is when you make a big decision without God.

The way that this begins to first come to the surface: we're going to look at the text today, and I'm going to just draw out things. Because some things that the Hebrew narratives communicate are overt and direct to us—they want to explain something—but sometimes there are these illusions, or there's these repetitions of phrases or words. You notice sometimes when you're studying your Bibles that these things come to the surface, and they're communicating something subtle to us about the text that the author is trying to share for us.

We actually see right here in the very first part of the chapter, it says: "When Samuel became old, he made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah; they were judges in Beersheba. Yet his sons did not walk in his ways, but turned aside after gain. They took bribes and perverted justice."

You have two sons, and immediately when you think about that, that should remind us earlier in this text there were two sons. There were two sons of the high priest Eli, and these sons were not good sons. All of a sudden, what the writer here is doing is making an allusion back to something earlier in the story. We should all of a sudden sort of go back and say, what was happening there, and what happened in the midst of it? In Eli's time, this created problems: God's presence was leaving, these sons were wicked, they lost the battle, tragedy struck.

The elders got together and they decided on a solution. In that case, in Eli's time, they decided, "Let's carry the ark of God into battle." And that did not go well. One of the keys, if we looked at that story, they did not inquire of God. They didn't say, "God, what is your will here? Why did we lose this battle? What's going on, what's happening?" They didn't have this great repentance moment or anything like that. They just said, "There's a problem, we're going to come up with our own solution to this problem," and it goes really bad.

Right now, we see once again two sons, and there's a problem, and there's evil among these two sons. We should be starting to think: and the elders here, the judges here, what solution do they have? They've got a solution to this. And they have not inquired of the Lord. They've not inquired of God, they've not come to him. They've just decided, "Here's a great solution for our problem: we just need a king. That's what we're going to do."

Think about that for just a second. This is a major decision. I mean, it's like you're going from a completely different government structure. You're going from sort of a loose confederation of tribes and a judge to a monarchy. If we as a nation all of a sudden want to become a monarchy, it's a huge thing, it's a huge shift. In life, when we're making big decisions, when things are coming up, do we inquire of God for wisdom? Do we call out to him? Because these are warning signs.

If we are approaching crossroads in life and we are not committing our way to the Lord, then there's danger. Scripture reminds us: commit your way to the Lord, and your plans will be established. Because what can happen oftentimes is as we pause, as we pray, and as we listen, even in the midst of our prayers, God meets us and he directs us. There's not always some voice from heaven that just says "go this way" or "walk that way," but the inclinations of our heart through prayer, through inviting God into our life, into the goings and comings of our life, into the decisions of life—we invite the Lord's presence and his wisdom, his guidance into our life. We need that. We shouldn't try to live this life and say, "What's going to work for me? What's the proper solution for this?" but inviting the Lord into these things.

We see right here a clear indicator that this is a bad path that they're on, and they are already giving us a clear warning sign: they're not inquiring of God. They're doing the same thing the two sons of Eli did—they're just going to come up with a solution, and they're coming and not asking for the Lord's guidance in any of this.

When you aren't honest with yourself

Ultimately, this request itself, it's really a guise. It's a guise for a deeper issue that's going on in their own hearts.

When you aren't honest with yourself about what drives your decisions, this is already a bad sign going on. When you're not honest with God, especially about what's going on in your heart, and when you're not honest with yourself, you'll just kind of run through life and not pause, not pray, not reflect. That's what the elders right here are doing.

It says in verse 5: "And said to him, 'Behold, you are old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.'" What they're doing right here is they are using a phrase that's from Deuteronomy. We see right here in Deuteronomy chapter 17 that it's a direct call: "When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, 'I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me...'"

So they are in essence coming to Samuel and saying, "The time has come. We can have a king. It's in the Bible! It's in our scriptures for us to have a king, so this is a good solution. It's time for this." So they're using scripture and saying, "There's a problem, we don't need to inquire of the Lord, we found a verse in the Bible to prove our point."

Right here, we even see this is just something that the Lord is saying: "You're going to say this." What he's going to say after this verse in Deuteronomy 14 is God begins through Moses to give all the ways that the king should operate and be different than the kings of the nations around. He gives all of these different pieces. God is not telling them "you must have a king"; he's mostly just saying to them, "When you do this, just be sure..." and he gives them some guidelines for how that king should operate. It's ultimately some guidelines that curb the power of the king so that he's not like the kings of the nations.

What's this really about then? Why all of a sudden the king, and why using the scriptures here to sort of forward and give credibility to their request? Because they had a judge. They had judges in the past. The judges and a prophet like Samuel proclaim the judgment of God, they bring justice into the land, they ultimately are ambassadors on behalf of God in the land. So why a king?

Ultimately, they're not honest. It's really about the fact of what we see later on when they ask for the king, and then they begin to demand the king. We see in the elaboration what's really going on. Verse 20, they say: "...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."

They want a king they can see. They want a king they can look to and rely on. Because there is something—I've talked about this before—there's something in life where we tend to trust the things that we can see and not the things that we cannot see. Time and time again, it happens in our life where we have such a hard time with choosing and trusting and relying on God because we can't see him. We would rather find an idol or money or things in our life and say, "I can trust that. I can set up a king in my life, I can look to him, I can put my hope in him and my trust in him, and he can be this great leader." It's just one instance in life where we want to trust the things we can see over what is unseen.

That's not the life of faith. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Faith is trusting not just what we can see, but in what is unseen. To be honest here is to just admit that they're afraid, that they don't trust that God will be there to deliver them, to say, "We want a king we can see because we're not sure if God will judge, if God will set up somebody to be a good judge in place of Samuel's sons, that we can have a great leader who will deliver us from the Philistines." They just need to be honest with God, but they're not even honest with themselves about it. They just want to use scripture to make their claim—which, by the way, is not a new way to use scripture: find one verse in the Bible and that proves your point for something.

Here, God wants us in life to just be honest. Because it's not until we're honest with God that he can really begin to work on our hearts. See, when you come to God and you're just honest and you say, "I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm afraid," you give air to those things and put them before the Lord, and it allows his voice to come again and work on those things of the heart. It gives him the opportunity to speak and to call to mind things to address those things in our life.

Even for these elders, for them to just air their concerns before the Lord: "We're not sure you're going to protect us. We don't like trusting what we cannot see," and allowing the Lord to stoop into those places, it's possible that he would remind them of what they just saw in previous chapters of who gave them deliverance. Was it a single visible king? Was it a human leader, or was it God himself? It was God. Sometimes the Lord will just remind us, and he will just breathe on things that will increase and grow our faith.

Until we're honest and we come to God with these things and we pour them out, then we don't have the opportunity to heal. We don't have the opportunity for God to lead us into wisdom. So God calls us to be honest.

When you don't learn from the past

When we aren't honest, we wind up repeating the mistakes that we've made in the past. That's the next thing that we see: when you don't learn from your past. Well, we know the expression: when you don't learn from your past, you're doomed to repeat it.

We see right here in verses 7 and 8, the Lord says to Samuel: "Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. According to all the deeds that they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you."

The Lord is saying to Samuel, "I've seen this thing before. I've seen this play out over and over in the lives of these people." From the moment he brought them up from Egypt, immediately within a very short period of time, they needed something they could see and trust in, so they set up a golden calf: "This is the god that delivered us from Egypt." Over and over and over again, these people have constantly turned away.

The call sometimes is just for us to remember and to be reminded that we need to see past mistakes. There are two ways to learn in life—two ways. You can either learn the hard way by making the mistakes yourself, or you can look at the history around you and in the past, and see other people and their warnings, either verbally or through the life story that they lived out, and say, "That's a bad path. That's a bad way to go."

Ultimately here, if the elders would just look at history: look at the last time we stopped trusting God. Look at the last time we weren't honest with God. Look at the last time we set an idol up and said, "This will save us"—what happened in our lives? Has that really brought a blessing? Has that really brought life, or has it been a way of destruction? But it seems time and time again that they forget the past about their lives.

One of the great stories about how this plays out in the world is in 1941. Hitler invades the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. He goes in and they think it's going to be a quick war. They had that blitzkrieg approach where they just take over a country within a matter of weeks. Well, some things happen, and some tactical decisions were made, and they make a lot of progress. They're getting deep into the country, all the way to Moscow. But then the momentum begins to stall, and then it lengthens out over months. They get to autumn, and things are going to go bad because winter begins to set in. You have a German army that doesn't know how to fight in it; they don't have the equipment, the clothing, the gear, the supplies, anything to fight, and it just gets colder and colder. By the time they enter into the wintertime, there's actually more people in the hospitals from frostbite than from gunshot wounds. People are dying on the battlefield because they're in shock, and a simple leg injury causes them to freeze to death. The Russians know: just stall this thing out, because winter's going to take care of them for us.

If Hitler had known his history, he'd have looked a hundred years before and seen Napoleon make the exact same mistake. You repeat the mistakes of the past.

It's so important for us to look even at scripture and be reminded—be reminded of the stories and the lessons of the past that speak to us, that warn us. In Romans 15:4, hear me when I say this: "For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope." Whatever was written before was for our instruction, to warn us, to guide us.

Judges of Israel, listen to what Samuel says! Look at the past, look at our history. The Lord sees over and over again what they've done, and the author is recounting this as he walks us through one more time. But they won't listen, and they'll repeat the mistakes of the past. They won't take inventory, they won't look at the stories of the past, but just continue straight ahead with good intentions, but discarding the warning signs of the present.

When you ignore the signs

When you ignore the warning signs of God, this is a bad path. We see a warning sign come up immediately here. The Lord directly tells Samuel to warn them about this kind of king.

Samuel tells all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking a king from him, and he says: "These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons..." We're just going to pause right there at verse 11. He says, "These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you." Now, in Hebrew, this is one of the great things about Hebrew: it can mean a lot of different things. This word "ways" is mishpat. You don't have to know that and memorize that today, but it means judgment, or decision, or verdict. It's what a judge does, it's what a ruler does. They rule in a certain way, they judge in a certain way, they bring justice in a certain way; they deliver mishpat.

Ultimately, what we find is this: back in verse 3, the Bible tells us, "Yet his sons did not walk in his ways..."—talking about Samuel's sons—"...but turned aside after gain. They took bribes and perverted justice." They perverted mishpat. They perverted their rulings, their decisions. The author didn't have to use this word here; he could have used other words. But the author here is telling us: do you think that this king, that his mishpat will be any better than the mishpat of Samuel's sons? "I want to tell you the kind of mishpat that he's going to deliver, and you're going to see in this list of 'takes' that I'm about to deliver to you that his mishpat will be no better."

You're trying to solve a problem, and you think a king is going to resolve this? You've not inquired of me, you've not come to me, you've not been honest with me, you're repeating your mistakes of the past. So I'm going to warn you, and I'm going to tell you right now: the mishpat right here in the Hebrew will not be any better. It's going to be exactly the same.

That's what we begin to see right here as we see this list:

• The king will take your sons.

• The king will take your daughters.

• He will take your land.

• He will take your produce, your servants, and your livestock.

That word just keeps coming to our attention: he's going to take, take, take. What's the ending here? "And you shall be his slaves." This judge, this ruler that you want to set up as a king, will bring the kind of mishpat that just takes and takes and takes.

In fact, this king that you want is even worse. This is a bad idea. Let me be clear: it's not wrong to want a king. It's the kind of king that they want—that is the real failure in this. It's the kind of king that they perceive in their mind that they want to set up: a king that looks like all the other nations, this great military hero that can come and rise up and be all of the things that they've longed for, that they can put their hopes in a human, in a man. Right here, God is telling them he is just going to take and take and take.

Your God is your king. I wanted this list striking to remind us so much about how God through scripture always reminds us how he gives the blessing that he pours out on our lives. He directly tells this to the people of Israel constantly: "Choose me, follow me." He talks about this: "I'm going to give you sons and daughters, blessings will come forth from me." Where did the promised land come from? From God—he gave them the land. He said, "I will bless you, your crops will abound and be fruitful." He gave them servants, even the kingdoms of the earth around them. He increased their livestock, and ultimately he's the one that freed them from slavery in Egypt and from bondage.

So which is a better king: God, or this human king?

We can do this in life so often. What's the thing that you want to set up and say, "If I can obtain this, it'll meet my hopes and dreams and expectations"? If I can just get it—whether it's the job, the money, the family, the marriage, any of these things in life—we put our hope in it and say, "If I can just have this, it'll afford this kind of life and it'll make me happy, it'll make me feel secure, it'll quiet the anxieties of my soul." God wants us to come to him. He wants to be the King of our life, as he is the kind of King we need. Anybody that he sets up should only ultimately be pointing back to him, not serving himself and enslaving the people to serve them and their own desires.

When decisions are based on appearances

Finally, the last piece is when your decisions are based solely on how they appear to others.

"Give us a king so that we can be like all the nations around us. It's time! We're a confederation of tribes, we're ruled by some invisible God—we can't even make an image of him! We don't get to worship multiple gods, we have to worship one God. We don't have a king that we can just march out in front of us in our armies and say, 'Yeah, that's our king!' We don't embody any of these things." The elders walk around and just say, "We're not serious as a nation. We only worship one God, we don't even have an idol of him, we're so different. We don't even have a king or a central figure. It's time to catch up with the times. It's time to have somebody, it's time to have something that we can look to and that we can show off to all the nations around us. We need to modernize. We need to be different than how we are, and the Bible gave us this ability—scripture has told us we can do it! So let's move forth and do it."

That desire, when your decisions are based solely on how they appear to others, that's meaningless. When the decision and the drive of your life is so that you can appease and live for the appeal of other people—what they think about you, how they perceive you—that's a bad drive in life. That's a warning flag for life, because it will drive you in all sorts of different directions where you won't even know who you are. You're just constantly torn apart in different directions trying to appease and appeal to other people and other things in this life, instead of asking: who has God made me to be? Who does he call me to be? You wind up living not for God, but for the respect and the appeal and the praise of other people, and we follow their ways.

Leviticus 18:3 says: "You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes." We look throughout the Old Testament that God took his people out of Egypt, and in Exodus 19 he said, "I'm going to set you up as a peculiar and priestly people. You're going to be different than all the nations around."

The heart of God's master plan for Israel is: yes, you're different. Yes, you're unique. I made you that way, I've called you to be that way, I want you to be that way. Because if you aren't that, then how are you any different than the world around you? What kind of hope can you claim? What kind of prophetic voice can you be to the nations around you? The whole point of being different is because your life and your ways of doing mishpat and justice and worship and everything points to the God of heaven. The nations around will see the shortcomings of their gods and the shortcomings of their hopes not being fulfilled in earthly kings, and they will look to you, and they will look ultimately unto the God of Israel. You're supposed to be different.

Church, you're supposed to be different. Christian, you're supposed to be different. Not different for difference's sake, but different as God calls you to live out. It's against the flow, it is countercultural, but that's how God calls us to live. Because if we try to be all things to all people, if we try to live for the appeasement of other people, if we try to water down the gospel and the truth of who God is and what he says and how he calls us to live, then what are we calling people to? How is it any different or any better than what the world has to offer already?

God wants his people to be a priestly people according to his grace, to be his temple, his hands, his feet, his vine, and to proclaim the mercies of him who called you out into his marvelous light. We're called to be a different kind of people. When our decisions are based solely on how they appear, we will try harder to be relevant to the world around us to earn their affections, their applause, their appreciation, so that we can keep up with the times instead of looking at God and living for the glory of God.

Conclusion

What are the warning signs in your life? What are the warning signs of where maybe you're not honest with yourself, or honest with God, or you continue to make past mistakes, or you don't listen to the voice of scripture? By the way, that's just one great case for staying in God's word: let it speak to you. If you don't know how, talk to us, and we'll talk about how to study scripture, how to learn his voice speaking to us. Because right here, overtly and subvertly in this text, the author is telling us things, giving us warning signs. The judges of Israel are on a bad path. This is a collision path for destruction: good intentions, but it's going to lead to disaster.

They need justice in the land. They need God to appoint someone. They're going to need a judge or a king or a leader, someone who rightly administers justice, who helps their world to be more ordered and to be the way it ought to be. Israel's desire for a king isn't a bad thing. It's the kind of king, and the fact that the king would be a replacement of God—that's what makes it wrong. That makes it good intentions gone wrong. They want a king that they can see, they want a king they can look to, they want a king that meets their expectations.

There's a justice problem in this text for sure. The land is not as it should be; justice is corrupted. We have a justice problem in our world. The world ultimately doesn't work the way it should be, the way it ought to be, the way that God wants it to be. You don't have to follow Christ to know that.

How do you know the world isn't operating as it should be unless there is a standard? It's only God. You have to admit that there has to be some sort of universal standard set by something outside of humanity, outside of every different culture, tongue, nation, and people that sets that standard. Ultimately, God and his word give us that standard.

Deep down, we all believe that there is true good and light. That's because God has placed it in us. The words "truth," "good," and "right" have no meaning unless there is a God who created some sort of standard that we all own. We may not agree on the path to attain it, but we all want it. Israel certainly is in that place. She wants a military hero, she wants someone strong and powerful, mighty and good. But the king that is coming soon isn't going to be the solution. Oh, he'll look the part—he'll be taller than everybody else in the land, very strong—but God isn't going to give them the king ultimately that they want.

One day, God did send that kind of King. It was his own Son—not like Eli's sons, not like Samuel's sons. This was God's Son, and he brought mishpat, his justice, into the land, and he absorbed the sin of mankind. He was just, and he was and is the King—the King that we should all look to, the King who dealt and will deal with justice in this world. He is the King we can trust, the King that we can look to, the King who will fight our battles. He doesn't replace God—he is God, God with us.

Yet we are so tempted to trust our own way. We want to meet our expectations instead of serving and surrendering to his will. Will you ignore the warning signs? Will you ignore and not trust the news about this King? You know what that path is—that's the one for your own destruction. Let go of your past and receive Christ for all that he is and all that he has done.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you. We thank you that you gave us not the king whom we wanted, but the King whom we needed. We thank you, God, that when we have made wrong decisions—right intentions, but the wrong rationale—that you still had grace in our stories; that though we so often do not call on your name, when we were not even innocent, I thank you that in the lowest moments of life, you come and find us.

Over and over and over again, as we fail you, you pick us back up to always say, "I am the King. Come. I will not take from you—I will take your shame and replace it. I will not leave you empty, but full of myself." We thank you that you are the God who gives, and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.