Appoint A King To Lead Us

1 Samuel 8:4-5 – So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

Deuteronomy 17:14-15,19-20 – 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.

1 Samuel 12:12 – “But when you saw that Nahash king of the Ammonites was moving against you, you said to me, ‘No, we want a king to rule over us’—even though the Lord your God was your king.

Application:

• ·         Moses anticipates a time when the people would ask for a king contrary to the Lord’s ideal for them. So Moses gives guidance concerning the eventual selection of a king.
• ·         The king was not above God’s law, any more than were the humblest of his subjects.
• ·         In the face of the combined threat from the Philistines in the west and the Ammonites in the east, the Israelites sought to find security in the person of a human king. The Israelite desire for and trust in a human leader constituted a rejection of the kingship of the Lord and betrayed a loss of confidence in His care, in spite of His faithfulness during the time of the exodus, conquest and judges.

All Scripture verses taken from NIV