Godly Leaders

Chapter 17, beginning with verse 14. Moses is discussing with the people of Israel about what their life is to be like after they've come into the land of promise. He's giving them the order of their structure. He begins by talking about the judges. He talks about the law courts. And he talks about the importance of placing loyalty to their God, Yahweh their God, as a key ingredient in all of this. And now he comes to a chapter, in this chapter, to instructions about how the political ruler, or the king, is to operate within his kingdom. The people of Israel, when they came to the land of promise, were all settled by tribes, you know. Each tribe had a portion of the land that was theirs. And they were ruled in each of the tribes by elders, people who were the older, more mature people in their tribes. And each city had their own judges, but there was no central authority for them. I'll help you to be impressed people, if you'd like to, if you can say the word, Amphictyoni, Amphictyoni, Amphictyoni. Well, George, we'll give you some counseling. The word Amphictyoni is a word that describes the kind of government Israel had for over 350 years. The word describes a government made up of small communities around a religious, central religious loyalty. This was true in Greece, where there were some worshippers of different gods. And in Corinth, there would be a community, or several different nations, we might call them, around one central focus on the god Aphrodite, for example. The people of Israel were all centrally located around the loyalty to Yahweh God. But each of these nation states, like the nation state of Benjamin, or any of the other tribes, the Bible calls them tribes rather than nation states, but they were really like small nations. They were independent, and they ruled themselves. For over 300 years, there was no central authority for the people of Israel. Each tribe went its own way. Each tribe made its own laws. Each tribe took care of itself. The time arose, and each of these times, a judge, a leader, would be raised up in a time of disaster. And they would rally all the people of Israel to fight against whoever the enemy was. And when the war was won, and peace came, then the army was disbanded. All of them went back to their tribes. There was no centralized authority. The book of Judges describes how this was done. A single ruler would be raised up to give all of the nations, all the tribes, a central law authority, and they would serve then together. But when it was over, each one went back to their own special places, their own tribes, their own locations. See, these people don't know what an Amphictyony is. And so, they're going to be outside of the whole discussion. In 1 Samuel chapter 8, the people of Israel come. They've had Samuel as one of their judges or leaders. And Samuel then is getting older, and the time for his death is drawing near. The people of Israel come to Samuel, and they ask him about giving them a king. The Lord had not described, had not said they had to have a king, or that they couldn't have a king. But He had said to them that this was how the kings should operate. In this story, Samuel, I was going to look that up, Samuel chapter 8, but I forgot to write it down. It's 1 or 2 Samuel. Pardon? Amphictyony? It is just a Greek word. It means a collection of states around a central religious figure or central religious idea. Separate, independent states around a... I missed that on a test once, so I never forgot it. I'm preparing you for when you take your seminary test, you'll be able to pass this, to know what an Amphictyony is. In this section, Samuel comes... Samuel, or excuse me, the people of Israel come to Samuel. Let me see if I can find that chapter. Yeah, it's 1 Samuel chapter 8. When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as judges for Israel. The name of his firstborn son was Joel. The name of his second was Abijah. And then they served in Beersheba. But his sons did not walk in his ways, and they turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice. So the tribe and the judge system was in trouble. 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 walk in your ways. Now appoint a king to us, such as all other nations have. But when they said, give us a king to lead us, this displeased Samuel. So he prayed to the Lord. The Lord said, listen to them, that the people you are saying to you, what the people are saying to you is not to you that they've rejected as their king, but me. As they've done from the day I brought them out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they're doing to you. Now listen to them, but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do. So he explained to them the king would treat them, tax them heavily. He would raise their children to be soldiers and take care of him. Verse 19, but the people refused to listen to Samuel. No, they said, we want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles. When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord. The Lord answered, listen to them and give them a king. And Samuel said to the men of Israel, go back, go, everyone go back to his town. Samuel then anointed Saul as their first king. In this story, God has prepared them by the passage we're reading in Deuteronomy for the eventuality that would come, that they would someday want a king. In the period when there was no king, they had tribal leaders, but they all believed that God was the ruler of all of his people. So God was, in effect, their king. The request for a human king in their place was a replacement for God. You remember, he said to Samuel, they're not rejecting you, they're rejecting me. They're saying, we need a person here who will be our king, and we reject the idea that you as our Lord are the king of us. This rejection was of God. So a very serious step was taken by the people of Israel in demanding that they would have a king. God suggested to them that this was a rebellion against him, but they wanted it anyway. We want to be like all the other nations who have a central authority who will take care of us. Fight our battles. Did you catch that? The covenant promise covered these things. I will guide you, I will provide for you, I will protect you, and I will give you meaning and purpose. One of the four kingdom promises, covenant promises that God made, they came to the place where they did not trust God to fight their battles for them. We want a king who will fight for us. And so this step was a step away from the covenant promise that God had made. God said to Samuel, and Samuel was displeased because he saw this. He said to Samuel, these people are determined to do this. From the very beginning they've been rebellious toward me. There's a very important lesson here in this, and you see it throughout the Scriptures if you're aware of it and you watch for it. Sometimes God gives people what they ask for even if it isn't his will. He wants them to understand what mistakes they've made by letting them see how it turns out. The kingdom in Israel never turned out very well. They had a couple of good kings, but most of them were lousy guys. And they led them into disastrous circumstances. But God let them have their choice because they kept on asking for it, and asking for it, and asking for it. And sometimes, you know, in the process of learning things, you can't always learn because people tell you. You learn by experience. I bet every one of us have had a time in which we heard something was true, but we just kind of had to try it ourselves before we discovered it was really true, that this was bad for you, or not a good thing to do. And God lets us do things sometimes. We ask, and we ask, and we ask, and we ask, but we ask with a mindset to say, I want to do this, God, and I'm just asking you to do what I want to do. When you don't pray with an open mind or heart, you close your mind or heart, sometimes God knows that the best thing to do is to give you exactly what you want, and let you live with it. And then you stop and say, God, why is all this stuff happening like this? And He can say to you then when you're asking that question, it's because you ask exactly what you got. He did this with Israel. It wasn't originally God's plan that this take place, but He made in this book of Deuteronomy a guideline by which when they ask for it, if they followed that, it would be successful even though it wasn't His first plan. His first plan was, if all of you people in Israel will listen to me and follow me, everything will work right. But they couldn't take that plan. So, God had prepared for it a long time ahead of time, all the way back in the book of Deuteronomy. When you enter, verse 14, when you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, and you've taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, let us set a king over us all, over us like all the nations around us. See, here's the first mistake. They didn't say, God, what do you want and how do you want our nation to be guided and governed? They decided what they wanted and made that choice themselves. And you see what their guideline was? We want to be like all the other nations around us. Peer pressure is not new. It's as old as human beings in this world. It just looked like to the people of Israel that the other nations had it so much better because they had a king. When they looked around them to the important person who was their leader, they couldn't see a human being, and they wanted a king. He said, when this comes, be sure to appoint over you the king the Lord your God chooses. The first regulation he made was, whenever you decide that that's what you really want, this is how it must be. It must be a leader that I have chosen. So in all of Israel's history, the leadership of the nation should have been someone God said, this is my man to provide leadership for you. Sometimes it didn't happen that way. Sometimes a group rose up and said, we're just going to take over, and they assassinate the king and try to take his place. And you see disastrous things took place when that happened. God's guideline is, the leader that you have must be someone that I have selected. Now that's very important for us as the people of God in our own time to understand. Leadership in the church has to be God chosen or appointed. It's not a matter of skill. It's not a matter of our abilities. It's not a matter of our wealth. It's not a matter of our popularity. It should be someone that God has selected. We're so used to looking around us and making decisions based on what we think, or we feel, or we like, or we want, that sometimes that spills over into the congregation. Spiritual leadership has to be someone chosen by God, or the whole process of God's leadership and work among His people will be thwarted. Samuel went out and he found the person God had for them. He went out and looked at the people that others would choose. And David's situation is a perfect example. None of his brothers qualified. David was the smallest, the least, the most unimportant. But he was the one person God had His hand on. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not a brother Israelite. Now, the idea of the foreigner is not a matter of racial identification, but religious identification. In the time that this story is written, every community or every nation had their own personal God, so that the God of the Syrians or the God of the Egyptians was different than the God of Israel. And everyone within the nation of Israel had loyalty to Yahweh God, the God of their people. So he's saying to them, you must have someone that I choose, and here is your test. It has to be someone who is also a part of the community, who has faith and trust in me. God always chooses, as spiritual leaders, someone who is a follower of His, who is devoted and committed to Him, part of the family of faith, if you could put it that way. The king, moreover, in verse 16, the king, moreover, must not acquire a great number of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them. In this one sentence, there are two things that God is concerned about. First is, horses in the ancient world were the most powerful military force that anybody had. They were the atom bomb of warfare in this day. A horse with a chariot could wipe out a whole group of soldiers who were standing with their bows and arrows or spears. The horse with a chariot running through them was a fearsome and awesome thing to them. The temptation would be for the king to say, we're going to win all of our battles by getting the most powerful weapon of war that we can get, as many chariots and as many horses as possible. You see why that's a problem to God? Because of the promise God makes, I will protect you. You remember the story of David. David one time decided he was surrounded by his enemies, and he wanted to know if he could win the battle. So he decided to take a census of all the people in his nation who were of the age to be able to fight and had the ability to be a warrior. What David did was he took the number of people to see if his nation was strong enough to defeat the enemy. God punished David and the whole nation for this. He made it known to David that he'd sinned against him because he'd counted his soldiers. The sin was that David was trusting in human ability for military victory instead of God. Now, in designing this structure for a king, the king must not be one who depends on military power, but on me for what I can do. If you look back at the great stories of the Old Testament, you see that oftentimes the greatest victories that Israel won were some that they never, ever even lost a soldier. Some of them they never even went out to fight because God, by His own power, caused things to happen that made the enemy turn around and just leave. In one story, when they came out after being surrounded by the armies of this enemy, there were thousands of people laying dead all around them, and not one soldier had gone out to fight. God wanted to prove to His people His great power. I think all of us in our culture have difficulty believing in the power of God. We're so used to depending on our own strength, our own financial resources, our own network of helping agencies and helping people, that we find it difficult to believe that I could simply ask God and He can do what I need to have done. God did not want the people of Israel to begin to depend on substitutes for Him. He wanted them to know and experience the power of God. And if you have a leader who depends on military power instead of me, then you've traded the greatest power in the world for human power. And so He made a regulation. One of those regulations was the king was not to be interested in gathering around him great military power. Now, both David and Solomon violated this principle. God, even the greatest kings that Israel had, were not faithful to these principles that were laid out here. No one in all the Scriptures is able to live a perfectly obedient life, and certainly the kings of Israel were not able to do that either. The second half of this sentence, where He says, they're not to go back to Egypt to get more horses, or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them. That phrase, return to Egypt to get more of them, talking about horses, points to something that appears to have happened in Israel's life. There was a time in which the king of Israel, horses were numerous in Egypt, in a sense, a source of great wealth if you had horses. But it seems as if the king sold some of his own people to the Egyptians for an army in place of horses that they would give him. So, in a sense, the great work that God gave to bring His own people out of slavery in Egypt, the king actually reversed that and sent people into slavery as a mercenary army to Egypt in trade for horses. You are not to undo what I've already done to deliver you from slavery from the Egyptians. You're not even to do that because you need the horses to defend yourself. You must depend on me for the strength and the military power that you need. You are not to go back that way again, back to Egypt as you had before. The king must not take many wives or his heart will be led astray. Now, both David and Solomon failed at this point too. Solomon was the worst of the offenders. Read the story of Solomon. In the beginning of his work, God asked him what he wanted and he said he wanted wisdom. And there the story is told of how God greatly blessed Solomon. But Solomon lost his wisdom as he began to expand in his wealth and his power. He married many different wives. At the end of his life, he was seen to be worshipping in the temples of foreign gods. They had completely led Solomon away from what God had asked of him. And after that, the nation of Israel was divided in two pieces. Solomon was the beginning of the end of the United Nation of Israel. And it was because he violated this one principle of not making sure that the central focus for all of his people was on one God, the God who delivered them from Egypt. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver or gold. Wealth was to be a great temptation to both David and Solomon, even the greatest of the kings. Solomon reveled in his wealth, the splendor of his wealth. And as he grew older, he began to depend more and more on it for a sense of value and worth. When he takes the throne of his kingdom, he is to write for himself on a scroll a copy of this law taken from that of the priests who are Levites. One of the things the king was to do was to write down the law, personally write it down. He was to take the law that was given to them. We don't know if it's the commandments or all of the things in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. But he is to personally write down so he will know what the law really says. He is then to read it. He is to take a scroll of this copy of the law taken from the priests who are Levites. It's 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. You can see in this that the king is not the priest or the spiritual leader of the nation, but that his life is to be guided by the instructions from God as to how his people should live. He is to know what the law is, to read it every day, and follow the practice of it so that the king is not free to do whatever he wants to do, which was the normal pattern for kings in the days of the Old Testament and even the New Testament. The king had absolute authority to do whatever he wanted. There's a story in the Old Testament about Ahab, who was the king in the northern kingdoms, and he wanted a little vineyard that was nearby some of his property. And his wife was a foreigner. He had married her against this principle right here. And one day he was in his bed, and he had his face to the wall, and he was pouting. He was upset, and she came in and said, Why, Ahab, are you pouting and acting so grumpy? He said, Well, I want that little vineyard over here, and I went out to talk to the guy to sell it to me, and he refused. And she said, Don't pay any attention to him. Just kill him and take it. See, she was from a foreign nation where the king had that power and authority. Ahab knew, even though he wasn't a careful follower of God, that that was against God's instructions and law. He went ahead and allowed it to take place. And the prophet came to him and said, Because of this, you'll die. God had specific instructions for the kings that they were to live under His authority. The king was not free to do, like all other kings, anything he wanted. He was only free to do within the boundaries of what God set as the right things to do. The king was under God's authority. Now, if this sounds familiar to you, we talk about this for ourselves. When a person comes to commit their lives to Christ, we say to them, You must learn what the Bible has to say, read it every day, and put it in practice. What is described here in the king is not the king like any other nation would have. But the king was to be the ideal Israelite. He was not to be God, but he was to be the example for all the nation of Israel. He's been chosen by God to have the place of leadership that he has. He is to know what the Scripture says, and he's to read it daily and to put it in practice. He is not to be seen as a person who takes the place of God. Verse 20, he's to read the law and these decrees, and not consider himself better than his brothers, 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. The king was not to be seen as more important than any of the other Israelites. In the New Testament, this concept is called the priesthood of believers. That is, that all believers have the same standing before God. There is not one person more important than another. Paul, in describing this, talks about in Corinthians that there are some who have maybe a more public face or a more public role that they play, but everyone has a critical role to play in the kingdom of God. And one person is not more important than another, because all have the Spirit of God within them, all have an assignment of God, and all are working in obedience and submission to God. What happens in the Old Testament is the king is held up as the kind of person God wants to be his follower. His role as king is just his function. He is to live under the authority of the Lord in obedience and submission to him, just like all of us are. When you enter the kingdom of God and you say, I give my life to you, everyone has an equal standing. That's why we are to call each other brothers and sisters. There is no hierarchy for us. There is one level of responsibility. Each one of us are not to look at someone more close to God than someone else. People oftentimes say, well, you're the preacher, you've got to be closer to God than anyone else. That's not true. I only have a function in this body, and all of you do too. And for the function that you have, you're not to look to me to tell you what to do, but you're to look to God. For each one of us is under God's authority. Remember, the Bible says that he is head of the church. This part of our body controls all the rest of it. One hand, even though it's the right hand, and may be more powerful and stronger than the other, is not better than the left. They're just two different ways by which we operate. What the Old Testament points us to is we're not to look to people to be more spiritually advanced than we are, but we're to look to God as the source of all wisdom and authority in our lives. So that you don't get yourself in a position where one day you have somebody that tells you, God has told me that we should all go off into the jungle, and you should all drink deadly Kool-Aid. And you stop and say to God, should I do that? And he says, no, that guy's nuts. Saves your life. And it happens almost every generation. A group of people will find some religious person who does and says all the things that make them feel that they're really special and important, and leads them to do things that are deadly and destructive to them. It doesn't make any difference who we are. Every one of us placed in positions of authority are subject to sin. And the only remedy for that is for all of God's people to be listening to God and deciding together what it is God wants us to do. Do we have people who are leaders in the church? Yes. We have people that have certain gifts that allow them to step up and lead us in certain dimensions and certain directions. But all the rest of us are to watch them and make sure that it is the Spirit of God that leads them. How do we know? The Spirit of God confirms in us that what we see in each other is the truth. It is God's way of keeping the church from scandal and tragedy. You just can't trust a human being to do that on their own. The Holy Spirit of God gives us the wisdom and insight to look at a person, to look at their character and their nature, and to know whether it's of God or not of God. So the church is to be filled with people who are on one level. The next level up is God. We are all children of God, with the Spirit of God. Now, the story that's found here never was lived out by David or Solomon or any of the kings. You know where we see it? In Jesus. He never claimed to be the King of the world. He never claimed to be the King of the world. He never claimed to be the King of the world. In Jesus. He never claimed to be better than anybody else. He never had a position of authority and power in this world. And when he called his disciples and they watched him, they saw here a man who listened to God every day of his life. He never did anything that the Father didn't tell him to do. Who, whenever he faced the most difficult time in his life, said, I would rather not die on that cross, that bloody, painful death, but if this is what you want from me, I will do it. He never sought money. He never sought military power, even though he could have brought 10,000 angels to stand in place and take him off that cross. Stand between him and the soldiers that wanted to spare him. He never did that. He lived exactly as God told the leader of Israel to be. And whenever we are called into the kingdom of God, you know what our focus is? Is to try to live like Jesus. Like Jesus. But we're so caught up in this world that we oftentimes look at Jesus and we read into Jesus what we think important people ought to be like. So you'll find books written in history that said, if Jesus were alive today, he'd be the greatest CEO of any company in the world. Or Jesus Christ, superstar. If Jesus Christ were here, he'd be a rock star and everyone would love him and everybody would be following him, everybody would be listening to him. No, he'd be exactly like he was. A faithful follower of God, doing what God asked him to do, ignored by many people, but living a life of spiritual power that no one could ever believe. What God is saying is every leader of my people must be a humble, faithful servant of me. Listening to me, reading the Bible, trusting me. If you will do that, then you will find, even though you have a king, that he will lead you in the right direction. I'd like for us to pray a moment. I think the challenge comes to us to say, is this description of the king a description of my life? Am I passionate to know the Bible? Do I demand a position of authority? Or do I see myself as a servant of all the other people around me? The great picture of Jesus was a man with unlimited authority who was an unlimited servant. Do I seek recognition of God? Do I seek recognition, fame, do I seek power, do I seek wealth, or do I seek God? Father, you've told us what it means to be a spiritual giant here. But we're so influenced by the world around us that we tend to evaluate things the way the pagan world around us does. Fame, power, strength, fortune, instead of spiritual faithfulness. Help us to believe that what you say is right is really right. Help us to seek it and to avoid all those temptations to pervert it. That we might be to our world the witness, the light that Jesus said we should be. We want to have spiritual leaders as you designed in the Old Testament, as you exemplified in Jesus, and as is needed in our world. Amen.