9.11.11--Scouts and Kings

When I turned 16, my dad worked out a deal with Papa, my grandpa on my mom’s side, to buy one of his ranch cars for Tomas, Ben and I to drive. It was a tan 1964 Scout International that Papa had bought from the dump and had fixed up to running condition. And with the little bit of extra money my parents could pull together, they bought it for us. This 4-speed hunk of metal was as unappealing to my teenage mind as cars could get, and I couldn’t believe that Dad would get me this instead of helping me buy a truck. So I started saving my money up until I had enough to afford the down payment on a Dodge Ram, the vehicle that, to this day, I consider being my first car.

I hated the Scout. It was a piece of work. The gas meter didn’t work, so we had to keep track of how much gas we put in it and when or we could easily find ourselves stranded without gas. You had to bypass 1^st gear when you started it because it would automatically stall if you didn’t. The radio and air only worked half of the time. And about 75% of the time, you had to get it rolling down a hill to get it started in the first place. The only good thing about it in my 16-year-old opinion was that it had a solid steel frame, so if I hit anything, my tank and I were going to be just fine.

When I made Dad come to the dealership with me to check out the truck I wanted, I could see on his face that he wasn’t exactly happy about my decision to buy another vehicle. He liked my truck, though, so he let me go ahead and get it. I thought that he was just worried that I wouldn’t be able to make the car payments and that they would end up picking up the tab. The real reason didn’t dawn on me until much later. I had outright rejected a gift that he had worked hard to buy for me. In my haste to own my own truck, I had unknowingly made him feel like what he had done was not good enough, that what he could provide for me was not good enough. 

I had turned away from my loving father in pursuit of what I thought I needed to be like everyone else around me.

On a much grander scale, this is also what the Israelite people did to God in 1 Samuel. From the time of Abraham up through Samuel’s time as judge, the only king that people of God needed was God. Yahweh was Creator, Savior, Lord, and King, and the Israelites did not need anyone else. Now, after a confrontation with the Philistines leaves the Israelites feeling vulnerable, they decide that they need a king to rule over them. All of the other nations have a king, so why shouldn’t the Israelites? God was no longer good enough for them. They needed a king to look to.

They turned away from their loving Father in pursuit of what they thought they needed to be like everyone else around them.

It’s like they don’t even hear Samuel when he lays out clearly what will happen when they have a king. Listen to this, and tell me if you would still want a king after hearing a prophet of God tell you this: “This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for 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 groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

Does that sound appealing? And remember that on top of this, the Israelites still have almost 33% of all of they had each year to God. When you add everything the king will take with taxes and the biblical version of the draft, that’s asking quite a lot from a militant people struggling to keep their land and nation together. And yet the Israelites will not listen to what Samuel has to say.

They are like a teenaged boy dead set on getting a truck instead of an old Scout. They only hear what they want to hear, and everything else goes by the wayside.

We do that a lot in life, don’t we? We spend so much time running around at work and at play that we forget to make time to read the Word or to pray. Or maybe it is that we spend so much of our money on ourselves and our loved ones that we can’t seem to find any to put in the offering plate. Or maybe we are fine giving our Sunday mornings to God as long as we can sit in our pews and not be disturbed, but we don’t have the time or the inclination to give any more of our time or energy to God during the rest of the week.

One of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther, the great German reformer, is “where you spend your money, there is your god.” Have we, in seeking the popular opinion and in seeking to be like everyone else, traded in our God for a lesser god? Have we begun to worship the god of sports, or of television, or of politics, of consumerism, of patriotism or of whatever else it is that we feel pressured into worshipping?

In Mark 11, we read of the story of Jesus throwing what in college we lovingly called the “temple tantrum.” He walks into the Temple, the holy place of the Jewish religion, where every year tens of thousands of Jews would make a pilgrimage to worship and sacrifice to the Lord, and he finds a flea market set up in the outer courtyard. Merchants and moneychangers and priests have set up booths to sell animals for sacrifice and exchange Roman coin for special Temple coin. The animals are hailed as “high quality sacrificial animals,” and the prices are through the roof. The coin exchange was schemed up for the sole purpose of conning money out of the pockets of people who already did not have much to spare. Temple coin? There was absolutely no reason for such a thing.

Jesus finds Himself facing a system that had been corrupted and infected by the outside world. Rome was about making money. The empire was vast, and a vast empire costs a lot of drachma to maintain. In an effort to conform to the ways of the world, the priests in the Temple had let the outer courtyard become what Christ calls “a den of robbers.” Jesus responds with righteous anger, working to right the wrongs he sees.

Are you at the point now in your life where you need Jesus, in an act of righteous anger, to flip the merchant tables in your heart and set you back on the right path? Have you found your self for too long following the ways of those around you, forsaking everything that your God has done for you just because the world falsely claims to have something better? Does the story of the Israelites in 1 Samuel sound like something that parallels parts of your life?

If so, know that it is never too late to turn back to Christ. It is never too late to change your heart and your mind. It is never too late to receive Christ’s love and forgiveness, for He will always be offering it.

I told Jessica that we're finding and buying that Scout as soon as we move back to Texas. I don't need it for the value of the car, I need it for the value of what that car meant. It was a gift given out of love that I rejected, and I will do anything to get it back if I can.

So may we might learn from the follies of the Israelites in our story from 1 Samuel. May we remember to hold our God closest in our hearts and highest in our priorities. May we constantly look toward God as our King, and may we remember that in Christ we need nothing and no one else.

Amen.