Musing 147

I totally didn’t forget to do one yesterday, no sir-ee.

One of the things I’ve been pondering after reading Identity and Idolatry is the nature of Saul’s kingship in 1 Samuel.

The first thing that’s really shifted in my thoughts of late is that the reason God views the desire for a king is rooted in the fact that in the ancient near east, the view of the monarchy was such that the king was either directly a god, or manifested divinity indirectly on earth.

And so the request to have a kind “like the nations” is really both a 1st and 2nd commandment violation. Which is a betrayal of God.

In turn, this also recharacterizes why Saul was rejected by God. The first rejection came when Saul took upon himself to make sacrifices to God. In the light of the ANE view of kings, this becomes much darker. Saul is saying “I don’t need a mediator, I can come before God and make sacrifices on my own behalf” and his following disobedience becomes much more pronounced in that light.

By sparing the Amalekite king, Saul has taken upon himself God’s role of giving and taking life. He has bridged the creator/creature gap in his own mind.

To further compound this tragedy - by most metrics of the historical books, Saul was a good king outside his treatment of David and the aforementioned disobedience that resulted in his kingship being rejected. He fought against Israel’s enemies, and drove necromancy underground. The elimination of evil practices and encouraging faithfulness to God were two of the main markers of a “good” king, and at minimum, Saul met one of them.

But this leads to the deeper question - is kingship a fundamentally sinful institution only made right through God’s redemption? Or is reflective of the hierarchy between God and His people that has been corrupted by sin?

To be honest, there’s shades of both in the Scriptural testimony. There’s no question that the Davidic line looks forward to Jesus and that God is consistently presented as the true leader of Israel. But at the same time, it’s also true that there is an extremely negative view of earthly kings and power throughout all of Scripure, where at best, scripture simply sets forward the responsibilities of the magistrate with no comment on particular rulers as wicked. And so outside the Davidic line, which was also . . . not presented overall as a necessarily good thing outside of a demonstration of God’s faithfulness to His promises.

But there’s also the reality that kingship is not the primary relationship of God and His people. It’s that of Father for God the Father, and husband for God the Son. At the same time, that doesn’t negate the pictures of Jesus in the Psalms as the coming King bringing justice and vengeance.

So there needs to be care taken in whatever conclusions are drawn. I think the best case in our context where there is a tiring of the flaws of democracy, and thus a renewed push for monarchianism is the recognition that a constitutional monarchy is the closest thing to an ‘acceptable’ monarchy. The king is not God. So if we ever go back to kings, a king must be someone who is himself subservient to the law. Not someone willing to make himself the law. Because to breach that nuance is ultimately to attempt to breach the creator/creature divide because God, as our creator, is the sole authority to set what the true law is.