Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript

Today, who is your provider? 1 Samuel 8. We’ve had a picture before us so far in the worship service the grace of God by witnessing the baptism of a child. It is this baptism, our union with Christ, that is our defense against God’s judgments that fill the earth. We seek a new reformation in our day. We love to sing songs such as the one we just sung, developed in Geneva under Calvin’s oversight, the psalter produced there, the Anglo-Genevan psalter, and its version of Psalm 2.

But Psalm 2 ends with a warning to all of us to bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. So we’ll be considering all those things, and as we look through 1 Samuel chapter 8, please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Now it came to pass when Samuel was old that 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. But his sons did not walk in his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gain, took bribes, and perverted justice.

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah and said to him, “Look, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” But the thing displeased Samuel. And they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” So Samuel prayed to the Lord.

And the Lord said to Samuel, “Heed the voice of the people and all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them, according to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even to this day, with which they have forsaken me and served other gods. So they are doing to you also. Now therefore, heed their voice, however you will solemnly inform them and show them the behavior of the king who will reign over them.”

So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who asked him for a king. And he said, “This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you. He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen and some will run before his chariots. He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties, and some will plow his ground and reap his harvest and some will make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.

He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. He will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, your olive groves, and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage and give it to his officers and servants. And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your sheep, and you will be his servants, and you will cry out in that day because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.”

Nevertheless, the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel. And they said, “No, but we will have 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 Samuel heard all the words of the people and he repeated them in the hearing of the Lord. So the Lord said to Samuel, “Heed their voice and make them a king.” And Samuel said to the men of Israel, “Every man go to his city.”

Let’s pray. Father, we pray that your spirit would illuminate this text for our understanding. Open our hearts that it might indeed smite us, but heal us as well. Help us to see the idolatry in our nation and help us to see the idolatry in our own hearts. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. Every year for the last few years, my election day sermon has sort of focused on what appears to be one of the primary issues dealing with the ballot measures that we address from our biblical ballot measure voters guide. That is the Parents Education Association. It does seem like the last few years there’s been a general tendency, an overarching theme in each of these ballot measures that we’ve considered. Last year most of the ballot measures had to do with criminal justice—how the trial system is conducted and what sort of punishments should be meted out to people. This year, as I counted, probably 20 of the 26 ballot measures have to do either very directly or a little more indirectly with taxation and money issues. What is proper levels of taxation? What should our taxes go for? These kinds of issues of the state and its relationship to the wealth of the population.

So it seemed good this year for the election day sermon to focus on a political cautionary tale from 1 Samuel 8 that instructs us in political issues relative to economics. I want to talk about that. I want to briefly address the last few sermons on prayer one more time, and it is somewhat related to today’s topic. The story of Solomon, of course, who comes along after David, and after Saul is selected here in 1 Samuel chapter 9. The story of Solomon is that he indeed becomes, that is, apostatizes and becomes that wicked king that God describes here in 1 Samuel 8.

Solomon is the one who, of course, before all that happens, is the one that God sovereignly uses to build his temple. Solomon is the temple builder extraordinaire. And as we look at the literary text dealing with Solomon’s reign both in Kings and in Chronicles, we see at the center of the recitation of Solomon’s career, as it were, both in Kings and Chronicles, we see at the center of his life this building of the temple. And we see at the center of the narrative about his building the temple in the Kings account, the center of that account is Solomon’s prayer of dedication that we looked at for three weeks. We looked at the new creation that we’re praying into the world based upon the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we saw that reflected in the seven specific petitions of Solomon’s prayer of dedication.

My point is that Solomon’s prayer of dedication is not simply important to us in informing us about our Savior’s comments, that his temple and now his church is to be a house of prayer. It’s significant for that purpose, but it’s significant also because it tells us that this is at the very center of the narrative of Solomon and his use by God to affect the construction of the temple.

In Dorsey’s book on literary structures of the Old Testament, he looks at the center of the parallel account of Solomon’s prayer, Solomon’s construction and dedication of the temple in the Chronicles account, and sees that its chiastic structure: God’s speech to the people of God blessing them. So we have two poles at the center of Solomon’s prayer—the pole of his prayer and the pole of God’s blessing upon the people. And that is what our lives as Christians are all about.

You remember we saw at the center of the chiastic structure of Solomon’s prayer, the fourth petition was a general statement of all the covenant curses which would come upon God’s people because of idolatry, seeking gods other than the God of Scripture to make provision for them. And thus the covenant curses come upon God’s people. And the center of Solomon’s prayer, which is at the center of the Kings narrative of the dedication of the temple, which is at the center of Solomon’s entire literary account of Solomon’s career—at the center of all that is this prayer that when God’s people repent because of their sins, when they repent from their idolatries, that God would remove the covenant curses and restore the covenant blessings based upon the work of the coming Messiah. Look, from our perspective based in the past in Christ’s historical work of 2,000 years ago.

So in all of these narratives, governmental rule and reign is exceedingly important. I was on KPAM radio for five or ten minutes this last week. They talked about voters guides. I don’t remember the woman’s name who hosts the morning show on that radio station, but I mentioned to her that I’d be doing an election day sermon this Sunday. And she said, “Well, isn’t that some sort of violation of church and state? Isn’t that bad that you’re doing such a thing?”

And I said, “Well, Jesus Christ is the King of Kings. So certainly his word has much to say about how kings should conduct themselves and how civil magistrates should conduct themselves. It is improper for an active pastor to sit and actively serve as a legislator. The separation of the institutions of church and state is real in the Scriptures. But it does not mean the church should not inform the state. And texts such as the one before us are clear indication that God wants us to understand the relationship of his word to how we govern ourselves in terms of civil government.”

She also was rather shocked that our voters guide was so biased. It seemed like we should have presented both sides of the issue. “Well, this sermon is going to be a little biased too. God’s word is okay.”

What I want to do is look at this, as I call it here, a political cautionary tale from 1 Samuel 8. I want to look at the structure and layout of it and then draw a couple of points of application at the end. And what we find in this tale is, first of all, the apparent reasonableness of the request, the necessity.

And as I looked at this account and meditated on it, it seems to me that if you just stop short of God’s answering Samuel’s prayer, what the people asked for seems to make sense. It makes sense, first of all, because there were these bad kids. Samuel’s kids, you know, didn’t walk in his ways. And the normal correlation there is, “Well, if you’ve got bad kids, you’ve got a bad dad too. We’ve got to replace Samuel as well as making sure his kids don’t stay in office.”

So he’s got bad kids. The text tells us. Secondly, there’s a need for a succession plan. They’re thinking about the future. They’re trying to make plans for what’s going to happen when Samuel dies. And it seems like it’s proper to think about that kind of thing.

Third, they knew that the covenant law in Deuteronomy 17 didn’t forbid kings. They knew that God expected them eventually to require a king because Deuteronomy 17 gives instructions for what a righteous king is supposed to do. He’s supposed to do all the things that Solomon didn’t do. He’s not supposed to multiply horses, multiply wives, or multiply money. And that’s just what Solomon does.

And the preeminent example of that is the fact that he amasses a fortune of 666 talents of gold. So Solomon is a picture of what the king is forbidden to do in Deuteronomy 17. And as Solomon moves that way toward the end of his career, he is also the opposite of what Deuteronomy 17 tells kings to do. And that is to meditate on the law of God. Civil magistrates are to meditate on the law of God. That’s what Deuteronomy 17 says. This is an important point and I want to stay here for just a minute or two.

For our particular pastoral understanding, our particular pastoral situation, our context as a church, we’ve been informed in terms of our movement toward covenantal theology and reformed truths. We were sort of led into all of this—most of us here at least—by way of the reconstructionists or the transformationalists, whatever they want to call themselves these days. And it seems like at least in the early days of that movement, the model of tribal rule was exalted as the only really legitimate biblical structure of government.

And what we see, I think, instead in the Old Testament is a maturation of government from families and patriarchs to tribes to still somewhat patriarchal and then toward a monarchy. And that is not a bad movement. That’s a natural movement. As a culture grows in numbers, as God blesses his people and causes them to multiply, they become engaged in cities and big geographic regions that are populated with lots of people. And they have a requirement for more administration and oversight that changes from tribal leadership.

Representative democracies are good and proper, but the Scriptures say there is nothing wrong and much to commend the model of kingship and monarchy as well. So the Scriptures give us several models of civil governance, and they knew that in Deuteronomy 17 the model of monarchy was not necessarily a bad thing. At some point in time, as they matured into a need for that kind of centralization—all centralization is not bad. We tend to think that way. We live in the context of a world that has become totally centralized with bureaucracies, etc. And we’re tempted to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

But the Scriptures say there’s a proper centralization of a king or a monarch that is good and proper at times. If we had the time, we don’t have the time, but we could look at what David did in terms of remapping the geographic entity of Israel and what he did is he overlaid—and Solomon did as well, before his apostasy—they overlaid the tribal boundaries with administrative districts that kind of went over tribal areas. So there was a maturation and development. There was a layering of administrative government based not on the tribes.

Now, there was still, in the context of the monarchy, a very important balance between smaller units of government and larger ones. Let me just divert here for just a minute to talk about the Electoral College a little bit. You know, if we have—and I don’t think we will, I don’t think it’s going to be close to being that close—but if we do have a situation in our lifetime when a president wins the popular vote and yet loses the Electoral College vote, there’ll be a huge human cry. Particularly if the man that loses the Electoral College vote is a Democrat, there’ll be a huge hue and cry to get rid of the Electoral College.

Now, do you understand why we have the Electoral College? Do you understand why there are two senators from each state regardless of the size of the population? See, all of that is based upon this biblical idea of checks and balances and unity and diversity—that the centralized whole of the people is important but the particular units of the people are important as well. An Electoral College represents the importance of states as geographic ruling entities regardless of population size.

Now it’s geared to population because the number of electors takes the population into account, but it is one of the few remaining buffers to a totally democratic non-representative government—the Electoral College and this Senate having two senators from each state regardless of population. So I’m not saying that a centralized monarchy the way that Solomon turned his into, or the way that First Kings 8 describes, is good. But you have to understand: you cannot take one slice of Old Testament history, the tribal period, and look at the case laws as they were given to govern tribal governments and then project that onto the rest of history. Because the Bible says they moved forward with the blessings of God and there was a degree of centralization that was proper in a godly monarch as Deuteronomy 17 describes.

These people, you know, could have made the claim, “Well, a king’s a good thing. It’s time for a king now. Kings are good.” Fourth, the reasonableness of this request is the threat of the Ammonite king, Nahash. Nahash is the Ammonite king that’s talked about in 1 Samuel 12. It’s not evident here, but behind the scenes there’s this Ammonite king whose name is Nahash, which means serpent. So he’s the serpent king. And he is what the threat to the people is—why they’re saying, “Here, we’re going to need some strong ruler to take care of us. This Ammonite guy is out there.”

We’re going to talk about Ammonites later on today because the Ammonites are the ones who worship Molech. Molech was the state. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. But they had these problems out there. And then as you’re reading this account, you take all this into account. You think, “Well, he’s got bad sons. He must be a bad guy. They need to make a succession plan. A king was a good thing. They’re going to have a threat to them in terms of this Nahash guy out there who is going to threaten them.”

And then finally, you get to Samuel’s response and they say, “Give us a king.” And he gets upset and he sort of seems almost, if you just stop right there, like kind of a crotchety old guy. The way old guys kind of get crotchety and kind of—you know, you could read it as he’s trying to protect his own power base. So it seems like a reasonable request.

But we’re quickly, of course, squared away on our understanding of what it is because we then have, in the next section, verses 7 to 9, the divine appraisal of this request. Now, see, I’m making this point because idolatry can seem practical. It can seem like it’s necessary. It can seem like the right thing to do if you don’t think it through from a deeper perspective.

Well, Samuel is not a crotchety old man. And we know that because what he does next is—because he’s displeased, he doesn’t talk to them about his displeasure. He prays. And it’s his prayer that brings that light, that first light, discernment, evaluation. It helps us to see what’s really going on as God answers his prayer.

You know, you could say that Samuel prays in terms of that first petition that Solomon teaches us of, or God teaches us through Solomon in the prayer of dedication. And God brings light to this situation.

Now, on your outlines, I’ve given you what I think is a rather obvious chiastic structure. Hopefully you don’t get all nervous and squirmy when I say that word anymore. You know, it just means that there’s a structure—you kind of find similar things at the beginning and end of this account. In verse 7, as God begins to answer Samuel, he says, “Heed the voice of the people and all that they say to you.” And the last thing he says as well to them at the end of this, verse 9, is, “Now therefore heed their voice. But warn them about what’s going to happen to them.”

So he begins by telling them, “Listen to them. Heed their voice. Heed the people.” And the next thing he says is, “They’ve not rejected you.” And just before the final heeding the people, he says, “So they are doing this to you also.” So he says, “Heed the people. They’re not rejecting you. They are rejecting me.”

And then at the center, I think, of this obvious literary structure of chiasm, we have in these three verses—at the center is the focal point here: “They have rejected me that I should not reign over them.” Okay, so: heed the voice of the people. They’ve not rejected you. They have rejected me that I should not reign over them. There’s the center.

The sin of idolatry in the people in this account is the sin of not wanting God to reign over them. And then he backs out. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them out of Egypt, even to this day, with which they have forsaken me and served other gods.

And that correlates to them rejecting him. They’ve forsaken me. They’ve served other gods. When we forsake God, when we reject him as king over us, we forsake him. And that forsaking is tied then to other gods. It’s like Joshua: “Well, if you’re not going to serve the Lord God, then choose this day who you will serve. The gods of the Ammonites, Molech, Chemosh, or—here, you choose which foreign god you’re going to serve.”

But in the words of Bob Dylan, you have to serve somebody. And so when God clarifies this situation, we see that the heart of the matter of idolatry of these people, the practical idolatry they were entering into, was a rejection of God as king. And it’s a rejection that finds its way into them not serving him but instead serving other gods. And that idolatry is manifested with the rejection of God’s ordained authority, Samuel.

So Samuel is not to take it personal. So often in our lives when people sin against us, we kind of take it personal. When brothers or sisters in the faith do things that are hurtful and harmful to us, we’re liable to take it personal. I think this is a text we want to really get down to understand.

Look, if somebody really is sinning against you, it’s usually not you. It’s what you’re representing. It may well be that you’re representing God to them in some fashion. Ten or fifteen years ago when people got mad at me as pastor and did this or that or the other thing or talked about me or whatever it was, I took it real personal. I don’t take it very personal anymore. Now, hopefully I still hear the corrections. I don’t mean to say I don’t listen to people’s criticisms. But I know that more often than not, people’s problems with me are really problems with God.

Now, I know I’ve got my problems and I’ve got my shortcomings and I have to hear from you about those things. But frequently the pastor, or the father in the family, or the wife when she turns to the flag from a husband—what you’re really getting is not really aimed at you. It’s a rejection of God’s reign over them, and it is a sin of idolatry, replacing serving God with someone else.

So God brings light to this situation. And in doing so he teaches us some very important things about what happens when we seek something that seems good, seems necessary, but in actuality, they’re rejecting God or entering into idolatry as a result of that.

Well, God tells them, in addition to this response to the prayer that ends it, he warns them. He tells Samuel, “Heed the people, but warn them what’s going to happen.” And Samuel then does that. And in verses 10 and following, we have then the divine answer to the request. And that answer is judgment.

And I think that if we outline it the way I’ve got it here, it helps us to understand a little bit. Otherwise you read this text and it just seems like a whole list of things that are going to happen. But Samuel tells the words of the Lord to the people who ask him for a king. You know, let’s, you know, it’s so easy to take these biblical accounts and abstract them so they don’t really have much to do with us.

We can say in our idolatry, “Well, if we had the voice of God talking to us, we would have been a lot better than these people.” Because Samuel’s going to tell them what God says here in terms of the judgment upon them for this, and they’re going to say, “Well, that’s okay. We’re going to do it anyway.” Because they don’t believe him. Their problem is a problem of faith. They don’t believe God. They don’t believe Samuel telling them these things.

But that really is not very different from you and me. They don’t hear a voice from heaven. They hear a voice as we normally hear the voice of God mediated. God’s word comes to us through others. But they already have a problem with him because of their assumption that he must have done something wrong because his kids are bad and he’s old and they don’t respect him. So when he comes around to tell them what God is saying, they doubt it. They don’t believe it.

But of course, we know that it’s the word of God. We’re given the background information here that this is God’s authoritative word that tells us that Samuel knows God’s word and he is giving it to the people. But understand that we’re the same way. We need to hear our brothers and sisters reminding us and warning us about our idolatry and the destruction that lies in the path of those who seek idolatrous solutions to their lives.

Okay. So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who asked him for a king, and he said, “This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you.” And that word behavior is almost judgment—the same kind of word. “This will be the judgment of the king who will reign over you. He’ll take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and be his horsemen and some will run before the chariots. He’ll appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties. Will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest and some to make his weapons of war for equipment for his chariots. So your children, your sons, and now your daughters.”

He’ll take your daughters. And I hope you heard that inflection as I read this account. He’ll take your sons. He’ll take your daughters. He’ll take the best of your fields. He’ll take the tithe of your grain and vintage. He’ll take your male servants. He’ll take a tenth of your sheep. Six references to the taking of this fallen king.

This king is a representation of the fallen man. Six being the number of man—the day of the day of man’s creation. Well, what he does is he takes the king’s children. Remember, these people already have a king. It’s Yahweh. But instead of them being the king’s children, Yahweh, there, will grow up in the context of statism, and the king will assert sovereignty over him. So he’ll take them to be his children. You reject God as king, then the king you serve, Molech or whoever it is, Saul, whoever it’s going to be—your children will become his children, and your land will become his land.

He’ll take your land. It tells us here: he’ll take your sons. He’ll take your daughters. He’ll take the best of your fields, your vineyards, your olive groves, give them to his servants. Wine and olive oil are the signs of blessing and prosperity from God. But your land isn’t your land anymore. It’s the king’s land.

Those are the two, I think, summary statements here. And then we have some more takings that sort of flesh it out some more. The king’s tax of bread and wine. He’ll take a tenth of your grain and your vintage. Give it to his officers and servants. You know, he talked about the heads of tens, hundreds, and thousands and fifties and all that stuff. We talk about a tent. We talk about bread and wine. We talk about olive oil. We talk about wine in terms of the vineyards that he’s going to take. We talk about the king’s kids and the king’s land.

The whole picture here is one of apostasy of the people. And they will be serving Nahash, the Ammonite, as it were. They’re asking for a king to protect them from Nahash, but they’ll end up with a king who is Nahash in many respects and principles. They’ll have a king who takes a tithe of their bread and wine, and he’ll take again your male servants, your female servants. He’ll take your children, and he’ll take your servants.

So all the people will become seen as ruled over sovereignly by the king. All of your land, your bread and your wine crops will be sovereignly taken over by him. And he’ll take even a tax of your sheep. He will tax—he will tax not simply your production. The way God’s tax is the tithe on production, he will tax your capital. Your sheep will be taxed by him. He’ll take a percent. He’ll take every tenth one.

Not every tenth one that’s born or that’s added to your flock, he will tax your capital base itself. And then again you will be his servants. He’ll take a tenth of your sheep and you will be his servants. The culmination of this judgment that God sends upon them through this king is they become the servants now—not of Yahweh but the servants of other kings, the servant of Nahash.

And then finally, this great judgment is pronounced upon them: “You’ll cry out in that day but God won’t hear. Even your prayers,” say your prayers, “will be selfish prayers unless your heart is changed. You’ll want a solution to your problems the way you want a solution to your problems now. God is telling them, ‘But if you’ve rejected my solution in me, don’t think I’m going to come along and bail you out just so you can continue in your idolatry of failing to acknowledge my reign and kingship over you.’”

So we have the divine answer here. And the answer is judgment. Judgment.

And by this time, we recognize the obvious folly of these men making this request. First of all, Ezekiel 18 makes clear to us that simply because there are bad children who are raised up doesn’t mean that the father has done anything wrong. We have no evidence from God that Samuel was a bad father. The only evidence we do have is the names of these two sons. And the names of these two sons is “Yahweh is God” and “My father is Yahweh.”

You know, in our church, we see people—you know, the last couple of kids we’ve had baptized, Trinity, baptized in the name of the Trinity. Her name is Trinity. Levi, joined to the Lord. Our names, we’re naming our kids these things. It’s a sign of our commitment. And I’m not saying you have to use biblical names, or—but the point is it’s an indication of the commitment of the parents to raise these children for Christ.

And I think we can take Samuel’s excellent record, his wonderful training, and the way he was used by God, and imply that when he names these children these wonderful names, he has worked diligently to raise them in the faith. But in the providence of God, they’re sinful. They’ve gone bad. And now they’re not living at home anymore. They’re adult children. It’s not his culpability anymore. They’re sin. So I think that first of all, it seems kind of like that might make some sense. Doesn’t really make any sense when we think about it.

Yeah, they needed a succession plan, but they didn’t need it yet. They should have had patience. Patience. What’s the great sin? Adam and Eve, impatience, grasping too early, to impose, to determine for themselves good and evil. And these people are not patient to inquire of Samuel, to inquire of the Lord, and bring back from the Lord how they should go about doing this succession planning. It’s absolutely needed, but they’re impatient and they want to establish their own method of doing that.

Kings—well, again, there would be kings at a certain time in the development of God’s people, but Samuel was displeased. The man of God who names his kids after God, who does everything he can to inquire the Lord and is answered by the Lord when he is inquired to—by Samuel. Samuel is the one that they should have sought for advice on a king, and it displeased him, the idea of a king at this particular time. They had no patience to wait for it, and they were no longer that peculiar people.

Remember we said last week that one of the significant elements of our prayers to God is they come from a peculiar people, a separated people to God. But these people wanted a king like all the other nations around them. So important that phrase. It wasn’t that they wanted a king. It was their timing of when they wanted a king, not waiting on God’s guidance. And it was their kind of king. They wanted they wanted a king like the other nations. They wanted to look at the world about them and say on the basis of natural law—one could say—”What’s good for us right now? Well, there’s other nations, they do it this way, so let’s do it that way.”

Look around. What’s the common model for how things are run in churches today or governments? That’s the way we should do it. No, no. They should understand that they’re called a peculiar people and their king would be different from the kings of the nations round about them.

And in fact, it’s really foolish because that lizard king that they’re seeking to avoid—they want a king, they want a king rather, to go out against Nahash, the lizard king. But just the chapter before, God has delivered them from the Philistines, and Samuel had set up a stone and named it Ebenezer. You know, we sing that song, “Here I raise my Ebenezer.” What is that? Well, it’s a witness of God’s provision, God’s victory in battle against the Philistines.

God had already beat their enemies. And yeah, there was another one on the horizon coming up, Nahash and the Ammonites, but God is well able to miraculously defeat the Philistines for them. They had the stone set up to remember that—we have our Ebenezer every Lord’s day. We have the picture of the victory of the Lord Jesus Christ over every one of our enemies. And if we rely on King Jesus to win our battles for us, we will win.

Unless we get impatient and seek worldly ways to affect the changes we want in the context of our culture. It’s foolish because God has already proven himself as the mighty king of valor who will lead them forth and beat their enemies for them at Ebenezer.

And old Samuel—well, instead of seeing Samuel as old and therefore needing to be replaced, they should have seen him as old and as such a man of wisdom, that he had the wisdom of age. The wisdom of a man who was contemplating more eternal things and truths.

I know some of you are getting a little worried about me. I don’t worry about me. I just am noting a transition in my life. I noted this last week as I raked up the leaves. We have big leaves, lots of leaves, lots of maple trees. You know, for the first 25 years or so of my marriage, we lived in a place that was characterized by the beating back of blackberries. That’s what I did in the yard. The perpetual enemy was the blackberry bushes. And every time I’d go out there and deal with those things, I’d think of brambles. You know, the Scriptures say bad guys are like bramble bushes. They’re like thorns growing up. They’re evidences of the curse. And you have to glove up. Got to know how to get to the root of the problem with blackberries. There’s all these analogies.

You know, you’re out there. I was out there that time doing that kind of work. And now every year my meditation outdoors is leaves—leaves that come falling down gracefully, beautifully to the ground in death. And I think about myself and some of you being gathered up as leaves. What will our death be like? I intend to spend the next twenty or twenty-five years of my life preparing myself to die well, to fall, trusting the Savior.

You know, unless the acorn falls to the ground, the tree doesn’t grow up. I want to do that. And I think that brings us into a sense of ease about ourselves and our relationship to God where we can speak the truth a little more nicely and kindly, but yet more forthrightly. Old men get like that. Godly old men have no problems reminding people of their sins because they don’t, you know, they’re not relying upon the praise of man. They know that they’re going individually—as the single leaf falls to the ground—to be with their maker. Eternal truths. Well, up.

And so they should have looked at Samuel and said, “What a great asset for us as we need to decide what to do about this problem with his sons and our need for perhaps a more centralized government.” They rejected it.

Then it’s foolish of them because they actually get answered prayers. Yeah. And I always think about that. I think it’s Garth Brooks, right? “Some of God’s greatest blessings are unanswered prayers.” They prayed for a king like the nations round about them, and God answered their prayers. And that was the last prayer of theirs he would answer until they really truly repented.

But if they cried out to him because of the tyranny of the king that would rule over them as they rejected God, he wouldn’t answer their prayers. He answered their prayers with a king to judge them. They said, “Give us a king to judge us.” They literally said that. And he gave them a king to judge them. He judged them by giving them a king.

Our idolatry—when we steadfastly cleave to them in spite of the godly evidence of the wise and those bringing the word of God to bear upon us—our idolatries, as we cling to them the way these people cling to them, become a judgment and a snare to us. They become a punishment to us. A king to judge us. And this king will take everything that they have.

So that’s the cautionary political tale. Be careful the idols you choose. Here we have people in our gross idolatry being turned over by God to political tyranny. What does it have to do with us? Well, a lot. A lot.

And you’ve already probably seen most of you, if you’re listening carefully, and I’m not talking too boringly, you’ve seen so many correlations that we can’t touch upon all of them, can we? I mean, we’re just like that in this country, are we not? We’re looking for somebody to provide for us. We have a fear of the future. That fear is kicked up by all of our politicians deliberately, particularly this year by those on the left as it seems to be the pattern, at least for a while. The fear of old age, the fear of who’s going to provide social security to you, the fear of who’s going to take care of the poor.

All those fears are used to drive us to idolatry, to have us answer the question: you know, who provides for you? The civil state is the great safety net for most people in America. That’s the way we approach our politics. And it is—if you take a historical perspective on this, it’s utterly astonishing, the degree to which our idolatry has become so much a part of this country. I mean, it is absolutely astonishing that between 45 and 50% or more of the gross national product of this country goes in taxes of one form or another.

Isn’t that astonishing? You know, in the times of our Savior, things were very bad in Israel. We read these parables about, you know, feeding the five thousand and “Don’t take heed to what you have. You know, seek first the kingdom and he’ll give you these other things.” And we sort of think of those people back then like us. They weren’t like us. They were a conquered people—the Romans. And before that, the Greeks, the Hellenists, had conquered them. They were a conquered people for a long time.

And when the Romans conquered you, you had to pay tribute. You had to pay taxes. The peasants had to pay on average somewhere around 40% of whatever they had every year to the Romans. And there was no messing around with IRS forms and courts of appeal. If you didn’t pay the tax, they would enslave you instead. They’d simply go into the whole city: “You haven’t paid the tribute this year, you’re slaves now.” Or worse, they would just simply kill a bunch of you. They’d kill 3,000 or 4,000, hang you up, crucify you until the taxes were paid.

Romans had taxes. The Herodians, you know, Herod the Great, horrible tyrant, great building programs. You know, he built the temple, finally completed about the time it was destroyed actually. Tremendous, beautiful temple. But he built all kinds of other things. He built whole new cities for Caesar worship. He gave gifts of palaces and temples to Caesar in other parts of the world that he would have built. He was a great builder. Well, a builder needs money to build. And he got it off the backs of the peasants, the backs of the people. And those people were sorely oppressed.

And so, you know, we look at their taxation levels and they were much worse than ours. But they’re a picture of the increasing taxation levels of this country. Forty percent is what they paid, and we pay somewhere over that now in terms of gross national product.

The problem with the peasant was that he was trying to hold on to his land. And if he couldn’t pay his tax, if he could pay his taxes, he couldn’t eat. So then to eat, he had to borrow enough to eat. But as more wealth went into the treasuries of the civil governors, they became the lending institutions. They control more and more of the actual wealth of the country, and they then got exorbitant interest rates from the peasants and they loaned them money for food.

The end result of that was the peasants lost their lands. So it was a cycle where the government took over more and more land from the peasantry. But at least the peasants began this process, and many times would successfully maintain it as owners outright of their land. How many peasants do we have here, being defined as those people that don’t have great income levels but have their own land? We don’t have any—very few peasants left. We’ve all been sucked down to a lower class than that—of people that are renting on a permanent basis from the government either through thirty-year mortgages or second mortgages or through the high property taxes.

My wife’s sister and husband bought a home—I don’t know, probably forty years ago or something—and by the time they—fifty years ago, I don’t know when it was—by the time they paid it off, their property taxes were higher than their principal and interest payments had been. That’s perpetual tenurship on land, not ownership. And it’s remarkable that this has happened.

You know, those Romans—if you were to tax a Roman citizen, why, that was unthinkable. The only people that paid taxes or tribute were conquered peoples. And there was a long process of states being able to move into direct taxation of people. I heard an Oregon politician years ago say that the art of taxation is the art of plucking the chicken with as little clucking from the chicken as is possible. And that’s been the history of taxation. Various fees charged first, then a development finally of direct taxation. And now today we have a citizenry so used to the government claiming sovereignty over our land through eminent domain and taxation. We can envision it no other way. We can’t even think of it any other way.

I was on the radio a couple of weeks ago talking about one of the measures to unionize home healthcare workers, and I was depressed after it was over. Every caller that called in said they wanted to talk to that dentist fellow who, you know, doesn’t want to force unionization on the workers who provide home healthcare, who doesn’t—who wants to throw us back to the 1900s when the poor were out in the streets.

We have become so reliant upon the civil state providing what we need for the poor in our country, our safety net. Should we get unemployed, sick, or whatever it is, we cannot envision a system other than that. It was worse at that radio show, trying to talk to the people that were in the radio studio with me. It was worse than when we used to go down in ’85 and talk about homeschooling. People thought you were from Mars if you were homeschooling.

But if we were from Mars and we were homeschooling, to talk about private associations, churches, and not using tax dollars to provide relief for those who are poor, for those who are sick and elderly—to go back to a voluntary system to care for these people, that’s not Mars. That’s the outer regions of Uranus or someplace way out there to people. Because, you know, we have idolatry in our hearts. We don’t want to rely upon God, who is our king and who promises us that he’ll make provision for us in all that we are. No, we want to take matters into our own hands. We don’t want to wait patiently. We want to indebt ourselves more and more. We want the civil state to provide protection for us from every possible calamity.

And when we do this, we are entering into Molech worship.

I’m not going to get to much of this rest of this outline, but it’s quite simple really. Molech worship in the Old Testament is state worship. The word Molech comes from combining the word specifically for king with the vowel points of the word shame. So it’s the shame of having a king as your ultimate king. And it was specifically—as I said, it was specifically—we’re told in First Kings 11:7–13, that it was specifically Molech was the abomination of the people of Ammon.

So Molech worship is state worship. Nahash was the picture of that—the serpent king. You know, who represents the belief of the people that the state is sovereign and that man’s culmination of his efforts together and his efforts to provide for himself, the divine expression of that on the earth, is this idea of Molech, which means king, or state worship.

So Molech worship is essentially a reliance upon the civil state to make provision for us, to be sovereign over us from the womb to the tomb. From neonatal care, food stamps, abortion funding—if we don’t want the kids in the womb—all the way up to Social Security in our old age. You see, “womb to the tomb” is the idea of sovereignty of the civil state over every area of man’s life.

And because this guy is going to provide, or this system is going to provide all these things, he can claim ownership then over every area of life. The doctrine of eminent domain, again—it’s something we just sort of take for granted. The state has ultimate sovereignty over the land, and so it can take land whenever it needs it. But this again was a development of legal theory. It wasn’t—it doesn’t come—it is not a natural occurring phenomenon.

But both of these things—taxation, direct taxation of states, claims to be able to conscript the men and women for various government services as well as eminent domain—both of these are aspects of the claim to ultimate sovereignty on the part of the civil state.

And as Doug pointed out in our discussions on the ballot measure, First Samuel 8 doesn’t mean well—9% might be okay for the civil state. No, it’s supposed to be a statement of horror to the people: that when they chose to have a king rule like the nations round about them, he will tax them. And in that tax rate, he identifies himself with the tithe that God the sovereign places upon them.

So civil government shouldn’t be near that mark. It’s to be an astonishment that any civil government would be allowed to have that kind of taxation levels over the people.