Give Me What I
Want—Part Two
1 Samuel 8:1-22
Last Sunday we traced a brief history of the nation of
Israel. We saw how they lived under a theocracy for 1,100 years and then in the
eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, they suddenly transitioned to a monarchy. I compared
this to the U.S. government suddenly changing from a democratic form of
government to a communist form of government. As it would be for our nation,
Israel experienced a massive and radical change from theocracy to monarchy, and
it all started in verse five when they asked for a king. But why did they
suddenly ask for a king? We didn’t talk about this last week. The immediate
answer is found in verses 1-5.
When Samuel grew old, he
appointed his sons as judges for Israel. 2 The name of his
firstborn was Joel and the name of his second was Abijah, and they served at
Beersheba. 3 But his sons did not walk in his ways. They turned
aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice. 4
So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah.
5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not walk in your
ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”
Samuel was the judge over Israel, but in his later years he
appointed his two sons as judges. The problem was that his sons were corrupt to
the bone and understandably, the people did not want these corrupt men to be
their leaders. It is interesting that Samuel made the same mistake that his
mentor and teacher Eli made. If you recall, Eli’s sons, who were priests, were
also corrupt. Eli made the grave mistake of appointing his wicked sons as
priests. Samuel comes onto the scene precisely because God raised him up to be a
priest instead of Eli’s wicked sons. But as an old man, Samuel made the same
mistake as Eli when he appointed his corrupt sons as judges. Therefore, the
elders of Israel use this as an excuse to appoint a king over them.
But God had a different reason for the request for a king.
To claim that Samuel’s sons were corrupt was a convenient excuse, but God’s
reason is given in verse seven. “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.
As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day,
forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. The rejection
of God did not start in verse five, did it? Israel’s rejection of God’s ultimate
authority started from day one. Most of us are quite familiar with the ten
plagues on Egypt and the miraculous rescue of Israel out of slavery. If you know
the story, you know that grumbling and complaining started from the very first
day of their deliverance. They didn’t reject theocracy when Samuel was an old
man. They rejected theocracy from the first day it was initiated, 350 years
prior to this moment.
Have you ever known a couple that was married for thirty
years or more and then one day they suddenly got a divorce? It’s a shocking
thing, isn’t it? In such a case, what is the first question that the family and
friends of the couple ask one another? “What happened?” How could they have been
married for so long and then suddenly get a divorce?” What do you think—do these
kinds of divorces happen overnight? From the outside observer they may appear
like they happened quickly, but in reality the seeds of the divorce were almost
certainly planted many years before the paperwork was filed. In some marriages,
the seeds of divorce are planted on their wedding day. So it was with Israel. In
verse five of this chapter, they formalized their divorce from God, but the
seeds of their divorce were planted on the day of their rescue from Egypt. They
feigned a marriage to God for 350 years. The request for a king was like filing
the divorce papers on a marriage that failed along time ago.
Therefore, Israel did not really move from a theocracy
directly to a monarchy. There was an intervening step. Their progress looked
more like this:
This
movement to anarchy can be clearly seen in the very last verse of the book of
Judges. “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.”
This verse does not only apply to the end of the period of the Judges but it
applies from the exodus from Egypt forward. The people did not suddenly start
doing whatever they wanted—they had always done whatever they wanted. Officially
they lived under a theocracy, but in practical terms, they were anarchists—they
did whatever they saw fit. They did whatever they wanted to do. On paper, they
were theocrats, but in their hearts, they were anarchists.
We are obviously not living under a theocracy or a
monarchy. If anything, we are probably closer to anarchy than the other two
choices. Especially in the realm of moral choices, wouldn’t you say that
“everyone does as he or she sees fit”? In this sense, it’s easy to apply this to
the world. The world is a moral wasteland and cesspool of iniquity. The world
glorifies evil and laughs at righteousness. The world celebrates every morally
corrupt choice and ridicules every morally upright action. It would be easy to
point our finger at the world and complain about how bad it is, and then walk
out of this room with our pride intact and our hearts unchanged. But you don’t
need me to tell you how bad the world is. You can pick up nay newspaper and read
daily news online to see that. I believe God has far more for us in this passage
than to scoff at the world and retreat into a cocoon of safety.
What I want us to see is found in verse eight. As they
have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking
me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. There is a two-step
process in this verse that leads a person away from God.
- Forsaking me
- Serving other gods
This reminds me of Jeremiah 2:13. “My people have committed
two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their
own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” When we turn away form
God, no matter how small or great, there is always a two-part process. We turn
away from God but we always turn toward something else. Jeremiah paints a
powerful word picture here. The two sins are turning away from the spring of
living water and digging broken cisterns. A cistern is a pit that is dug into
the rock or had clay that serves as a reservoir for rain water. In other words,
if you had a cistern, you had life. If you had a broken, dusty cistern, you had
death.
When I was in Guatemala, one small village shared a common
well. Women and children would walk from their meager homes and carry jars of
water back to their home on a daily basis, just as most of the world has done
prior to indoor plumbing. Now what would happen if you could install a little
faucet in every home in that village? Would anyone still walk to the well to
draw water? Maybe at first out of habit they would, but it wouldn’t take long
for them to use their own faucet. If it doesn’t make sense that these villagers
would still walk to the shared well, now imagine what Jeremiah is describing. It
is like a villager who has a faucet with clean, running water in his house, but
instead of drinking from there, he walks three miles to a broken cistern with no
water. If you actually witnessed such a sight, you would have to conclude that
this was some kind of ancient ritual which you did not understand, or else these
people are just plain looney.
But on the spiritual plane, this is what the Israelites did
from day one and what you and I struggle with every day. We commit not one sin,
but two. We forsake the Lord and go after other gods. Granted, we are not
engaged in actual idol worship and offering sacrifices to Baal and Molech, but
our idol worship is no less severe. In fact, like we said last week, if our
rebellion is a quiet rebellion, then our idol worship is a quiet idolatry,
because the idols are within our heart. And all idols of the heart always
involve two sins: forsaking God and following after that idol. In reality what
happens to us is a form of reverse repentance. When we repent of our sins, we
turn from our sin and turn toward God. But with the idols of the heart, it is
just the reverse—we turn from God and turn toward our sin.
What are the idols of our heart? Would anyone dispute the
fact that at this time of the year there is a huge temptation for football to
become an idol? Did you hear about the man from Pardeeville, WI who was arrested
for disorderly conduct for forcing his seven year old son to wear a Packer’s
sweatshirt? While watching last week’s playoff game with Seattle, Matthew Kowald
of Pardeeville forced a Packer’s sweatshirt onto his son and taped the shirt
around his body!
That is an idol! For our family Christmas picture this year, all three kids were
decked out in the Packer’s clothing. One certain, unnamed Vikings fan in our
church had the audacity to claim that this was child abuse!
J
The number of idols of the heart is nearly endless. Our
children and families can be our idols. We want them to succeed because their
success is a measure of our success. Our jobs can be an idol of the heart. Our
free time, our entertainment, the TV, movies are often idols of he heart. Idols
can be bad things like pornography and the pursuit of wealth, or they can be
good things like family and even ministry. From what I have observed and
experienced, I would hazard a guess that every pastor has their ministry as an
idol to some degree. I have seen pastors paralyzed by things like how many
people attend Sunday morning worship, weekly Bible studies or special events.
Their entire sense of worth, purpose and success is tied up in their ministry,
and if it starts to falter or crumble, they are just devastated. I try very hard
to be on guard against such things, but I know that at times the ministry of
this church has been an idol for me.
What about the building we are hoping to build—do you think
that can be an idol? Not only can the building be an idol, but the individual
parts of the building can become an idol. The color of the carpet can be an
idol. If you care about such things, even the pitch of the roof can be an idol
of your heart. The reformer John Calvin has a great quote about idols, he has
written, that “the human heart is a factory of idols. Everyone of us is, from
his mother’s womb, expert in inventing idols.”
I think John Calvin nails the problem of idolatry on the
head. Our hearts will always and continually be creating idols out of almost
everything. Can you identify the idols of your heart? About a year ago Karen and
I wrote down the top five idols of our heart. I am not proud to tell you that it
was far too easy to write down five. I could have written down more than five
and I could have had a contest to see which ones made it in the top five list. I
want you to take at least a few moments and name one or two of the idols of your
heart. Don’t say it out loud, just name it in your heart. Now that you have
named them, what do you need to do? The obvious thing to do is to name the idols
of your heart and repent of them, correct? If you don’t name it and repent of
it, this idol of your heart will continue to rule over you and grab the
attention and affection of your heart.
But now what happens after you have repented of that idol?
If Calvin is right, and I think that he is, very soon the number two idol on
your list will move into the number one slot and you will add more to the list.
So then what? Again, you must name the top idol of your heart and repent of that
one. Bu the cycle continues as the next most powerful idol overtakes the number
one spot in your heart. Can you see what I mean? Naming your idols and repenting
of them is not sufficient to stop them, and the reason for this is based on this
principle: We will follow whatever we treasure the most.
If we treasure money, we will follow that. If we treasure
success, we will follow that. Now at first glance it seems like a bad thing to
follow the treasure of your heart, but it’s actually a good thing. We have been
created by God to follow the treasures of our hearts. In fact, God wants
us to follow the treasures of our hearts. It is not sin to follow the treasure
of your heart, it’s only sin if you are following the wrong treasure. God wants
us to follow the treasure of our heart, but he also wants to be
that treasure. This is why naming and repenting of the idols of your hearts will
never be sufficient by itself. I did not saying that we should stop naming and
repenting of these idols, I am only saying it is not enough to do this, because
another idol will always be waiting in the wings to be number one. It gets back
to what Jeremiah wrote. We all commit two sins—one, we forsake God and two, we
follow after idols. In effect what we do is to place God side by side next to
all of the other treasures of the world, and most often our heart chooses the
treasures of the world. The core problem our of heart is not that we value these
other treasures so much, but that we value God so little. We will always follow
whatever we treasure the most. Therefore, until God is our greatest treasure, we
will continue to forsake him and follow after other idols.
We could repent every day for the next sixty years and
there would still be idols of our heart. We could rid ourselves of every worldly
influence, and there would still be idols of our heart. We could, as many have
done, move to monastery high in the mountains or on a remote island. But no
matter where we hide or how much we try to avoid worldly influences, we still
carry our hearts with us and we will still create new idols of the heart. This
demonstrates the folly of legalism. The legalist makes a long list of worldly
things which a Christian must avoid with the assumption being that avoidance
alone will bring moral purity. But what the legalist does not account for is the
idol factory that we carry with is wherever we go. Therefore, the answer is not
so much to reduce the pull of the treasures of the world, though there is some
benefit to be gained in that. The real answer is to cause Jesus Christ to grow
until he becomes your greatest treasure. It’s utter foolishness to try to pull
water from a broken cistern when we have living water available to us, but we
don’t see it that way. As foolish as it sounds, the treasures of the world are
to us like broken cisterns. We go after them even though they don’t satisfy our
thirst. And therein is another problem. We continue to seek after worldly
treasures because they cannot ever satisfy our true longing. We think we are
filled for a while only to realize we are as empty as ever The treasures of the
world are like eating dirt—they fill our stomachs for a while, but they don’t
satisfy our need for real food, and they slowly kill us.
We still need to name and repent of the idols of our heart,
but we also must make Christ our treasure of all treasures. But how do we do
this? The answer is almost deceptively simple—we simply need to believe the
gospel. One time I was witnessing to a man who got angry with me. Just to show
me that he understood my message, he summarized it for me. He said, “I know, I
know. I’m a sinner, and Jesus Christ died for my sins and rose from the dead to
save me from hell. I get all that.” What do you think—did he get it? He
understood the facts, but he didn’t believe it. Even if you are a Christian, we
may not really understand the gospel. I was dead in my transgressions and sins,
but God, who is rich in mercy, made me alive in Christ Jesus, even while I was
dead in my transgressions. In order for Christ to become my supreme treasure, I
have to understand and experience his gospel in a deeper way than I understand
and experience every other treasure in the world. We need to understand and
experience this until Jesus Christ becomes for us a spring of living water and
everything else in the world is like a broken cistern.
But I have never seen this happen overnight. It requires
that we immerse ourselves in these truths every day and test the Lord and his
commands as we walk by faith through the valley of the shadow of death and over
the mountain tops of wonder and majesty.
Rich Maurer
January 20, 2008