God’s Commitment to Freedom

There was a time when God chose a nation to be his saying to them “…if you indeed will obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you shall be a special treasure to me above all people; for all the earth is mine.” (Exodus 19:5)

What kind of blessings would result from this arrangement? Well, to begin with, what benefit would accrue to a nation if every person kept the Ten Commandments? For example, what if there was no theft? When you bought something you paid for that product alone, not the things shoplifters and thieves had stolen. The result is that the cost of everything would go down.

I was in Wal-Mart the other evening when the sales person called the manager to help answer a question about a purchase. As he got the item a conversation developed around the subject of theft. I asked him how prevalent it was. His eyes rolled and he threw his hands up in the air. “You can’t believe how bad it is!” he exclaimed. “It’s almost non-stop.” It occurred to me at the time that maybe the government should change its focus. Stop making it hard for Wal-Mart to do business and start making it hard for thieves to steal. But I digress. Let’s return to the point.

What results would occur if every man was faithful to his wife and every wife to her husband? Families would be stronger, drug and alcohol problems would lessen, most crimes of youth would stop. What if all the murders stopped? What if every citizen of the country was productive? You get the point. These sins suck the wealth out of a nation! When they are stopped, the inevitable result is that the nation will become rich. So, Israel must have been a rich nation!

But that wasn’t all. God promised to fight Israel’s battles. When the Philistines attacked Israel, “…the Lord thundered with a loud thunder upon the Philistines that day, and so confused them that they were overcome before Israel.” (1 Samuel 7:10) No nation, no matter how strong could defeat Israel. All Israel had to do was obey God. What a bargain! No people ever had such a deal. Israel had won the mega-lottery of all nations.

As long as the Prophet Samuel lived Israel prospered. But Samuel grew old and his sons “did not walk in his ways; they turned aside after dishonest gain, took bribes, and perverted justice.” (1 Samuel 8:3) So the elders of Israel realized they were in a serious predicament because they were about to inherit bad rulers. The elders were right about Samuel’s sons but responded to their fears and their reaction was a strange. They told Samuel they wanted a king to rule over them. In their fear-based reaction they reasoned that the country was going to pot, so to speak, and they wanted a strong ruler to straighten out the mess.

Why is that request strange? Well, why would the elders think that a king would make things better for Israel? If a judge was corrupt it was problematic but a judge did not have near the power that a king would have. A corrupt king would cause far more problems than a corrupt judge. Calling for a strong man changed the focus from God to man.

The elders request overlooked a fundamental concept. God was the King of Israel. All the elders needed do was ask God for help. After all, he had destroyed the enemies of Israel. There was no reason to believe he wouldn’t provide good judges. Ask and you will receive.

Samuel took their request to God. God told Samuel to talk to the people. Tell them how flawed such a system is. No matter how well intentioned the king may be, the system itself is prone to corruption. The king will take your money for himself; he will conscript your children and assign them to wars you don’t want to fight; he will take the best of your products for himself; he will take the most productive workers and make them slaves to serve for his personal benefit, not for the nation.

Samuel explained these things to the elders of Israel but they still wanted a king. And then God did something completely unexpected. God gave them a king.

The overlooked question in all this is, “Why did God give the people something that he knew would eventually cause the destruction of Israel?” Would you give your children something you knew would destroy them? No, you wouldn’t. So why did God?

The answer is as simple as it is profound. God is committed to freedom! His commitment to freedom is so deep that he proved it by letting them choose something he knew was not good for them.

Why is freedom so important? Well that’s the subject of another message.

Until next time,