A King...Like All The Nations Around Us

Deuteronomy 17:13-15,19-20 – All the people will hear and be afraid, and will not be contemptuous again. When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “Let us set a king over us like all the nations around us,” be sure to appoint over you a king the Lord your God chooses. He must be from among your fellow Israelites. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not an Israelite…It is to be with him, and he is to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites and turn from the law to the right or to the left. Then he and his descendants will reign a long time over his kingdom in Israel.

Judges 8:23 – But Gideon told them, “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you.”

1 Samuel 8:7 – And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.

Deuteronomy 7:3-4 – Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.

Application:

• ·         Moses anticipated a time when the people would ask for a king contrary to the Lord’s ideal for them. So Moses gave guidance concerning the eventual selection of a king.
• ·         Gideon, like Samuel, rejected the establishment of a monarchy because he regarded it as a replacement of the Lord’s rule.
• ·         The sin of Israel in requesting a king rested not in any evil inherent in kingship itself but in the kind of kingship the people envisioned and their reasons for requesting it. Their desire was for a form of kingship that denied their covenant relationship with the Lord, who Himself was pledged to be their savior and deliverer. In requesting a king “like all the other nations” they broke the covenant, rejected the Lord who was their King and forgot His constant provision for their protection in the past.
• ·         The Lord’s command against intermarriage with foreigners was not racially motivated but was intended to prevent spiritual contamination and apostasy.
• ·         The king was not above God’s law, any more than were the humblest of his subjects.

All Scripture verses taken from NIV