It has never been easy to live in a covenant relationship with God. No matter what period of time we live in, we want to be like the world. God led Israel out of Egypt and saved them, protected them, and loved them. Israel looks around at other countries and decides they need a king. Forget the fact that they had the Almighty as their king. Things haven’t changed much in thousands of years because we in America are not much different. We need a government (“our precious”) to take care of us. There are those that stand up and talk of a worship alternative, governmental alternatives, lifestyle alternatives. We all want an alternative lifestyle. We want change (“our precious, we must have our precious!”). We don’t want to recognize God’s sovereignty, which did not require hierarchical forms of leadership in the human community or in His spiritual church. But the lure of conformity is seductive, and the pressures toward cultural accommodation are great. Is this our “precious?” “Appoint for us a king…like other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). The people said to Samuel, in effect, “We don’t want to be different anymore. We want to be like everyone else (“our precious”). The pressures of alternative living are too great.” One of the issues raised by this episode for the community of faith in every generation is the lure and the danger of cultural accommodation (“our precious”). Isn’t this just a big slap on the face of God? Samuel raised his rejections to having a king and God settled him down and reminded him that the people were rejecting God and not Samuel (1 Samuel 8:7). Samuel tells the people what the consequences are of rejecting God as king and getting a man to become their leader (Read 1 Samuel 8:10-18). It’s funny that these are some of the same complaints we hear today about our government.
I get a kick out of us today. We think we are so much greater than the ancients. We think we are more sophisticated. We think we have evolved but we haven’t. We still make the same mistakes and most of all we reject our God and are surprised that He gets angry at us. We want our “precious”!
Questions: When does trust in human power become a rejection of divine power? To what degree have we let our trust in human authority overshadow our trust in God? Have we become like Gollum/Smeagol searching for “our precious”?