This is the sixth message in a
seven-part series called Spectacular Sins and
their Global Purpose in
the Glory of Christ. This message is called “The
Sinful Origin of the Son
of David.” The point is this: The kingship of Israel—the
fact that Israel
had kings—was owing to sin. It was a spectacular sin for the
people of God to
say to their Maker and Redeemer, “We want to be like the
nations. We do not
want you to be our king. We want a human king.” That is a
spectacular sin.
Samuel calls it, in verse 17, a great wickedness. Nevertheless, if Israel had had no
kingship, Jesus Christ would
not have come as the king of Israel
and the Son of David and King of kings. But Christ’s kingship
over Israel
and over
the world is not an afterthought in the mind of God. It was not an
unplanned
response to the sin of Israel.
It was part of his plan.

Why Do It This Way?

So our question is: If God saw this
spectacular sin coming
and he knew that he would permit it and thus made the kingship of Israel part of his plan
to glorify Christ as the
King of kings, why not just make kingship part of Israel’s
governance from the
beginning? Why not make Moses the first king? Then Joshua and so on?
Why plan
for a more direct kingship at the beginning and only bring human
kingship into Israel’s
history later through a spectacular sin?

Abraham and the Coming
Kingship

Let’s begin with the story
itself. God chose Abram as the
father of the people of Israel
in Genesis 12 and promises him that through his offspring all the
families of
the world will be blessed (Genesis 12:1-3). The Messiah, Jesus Christ,
will
come through this line.

One of the first things that happens
to Abram is that he
meets a strange figure named Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18. He is called
“priest
of God Most High” and “king of Salem.”
His name means “king of righteousness.” The writer
of the book of Hebrews, in
the New Testament, sees Melchizedek as a type or a prefiguring or
foreshadowing
of Christ, because Psalm 110:4 says that the coming messianic king is
also “a
priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” So Hebrews
says, “Melchizedek .
. . is first, by translation of his name, king of righteousness, and
then he is
also king of Salem, that is, king of peace . . . resembling the Son of
God . .
.” (Hebrews 7:1-3).

Hannah and the Coming
Kingship

So already in the purposes of God,
the coming Messiah will
be a priest-king. The decision for him to be a king did not come later.
We see
this again in the story of Samuel’s birth and dedication. You
recall that his
mother Hannah was barren. Then Eli prophesied that she would have a
child.
Samuel was born and Hannah brings him to the temple and dedicates him
to the
Lord. Among the amazing things that Hannah says is this in 1 Samuel
2:10—and
remember, this is decades before there was any king in Israel
(only
when Samuel is an old man do the people press him to give them a king).
She
says, “The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces;
against them he
will thunder in heaven. The LORD will judge the ends of the earth; he
will give
strength to his king and exalt the power
of his anointed.”

Moses and the Coming
Kingship

Back in Deuteronomy 17:14-20 Moses
had given instructions
about the kingship if the people ever went in that direction. And
Deuteronomy
28:36 foretold the exile of the people and their king if they were to
rebel
against the Lord. So I conclude that what happened in 1 Samuel 12 was
not a
surprise to God. He knew that this spectacular sin would happen, and he
knew
that he would permit it. And when God intends to permit a thing, he
does so
wisely, not foolishly. Therefore, this spectacular sin is part of
God’s
overarching plan for the glory of his Son.

How the Kingship Came

Let’s see how it came about
before we ponder why he would do
it this way. The demand for a king started back in chapter 8 of 1
Samuel, but
we will pick it up here in chapter 12. Verse 8b: The Lord
“brought your fathers
out of Egypt
and made them dwell in this place.” Verse 9: “But
they forgot the LORD their
God. And he sold them into the hand of Sisera, commander of the army of
Hazor,
and into the hand of the Philistines, and into the hand of the king of Moab.
And they
fought against them.” Verse 10: “And they [the
people of Israel]
cried
out to the LORD and said, ‘We have sinned, because we have
forsaken the LORD
and have served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. But now deliver us out of
the hand
of our enemies, that we may serve you.’” Verse 11:
“And the LORD sent Jerubbaal
and Barak and Jephthah and Samuel and delivered you out of the hand of
your
enemies on every side, and you lived in safety.”

The People Rejected God’s
Kingship

The point of those verses is to show
that God was faithful
as their divine king. When they cried to him, he saved them. He gave
them
safety. That’s what a king is for—to provide peace
for the people. And what was
their response? Verse 12: “And when you saw that Nahash the
king of the Ammonites
came against you, you said to me [Samuel], ‘No, but a king
shall reign over
us,’ when the LORD your God was your king.”

You can hear the disbelief in
Samuel’s voice: You asked for
a king, when God was your king!
What
should Samuel do? The Lord had already told him in 1 Samuel 8:7-9,
“Obey the
voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not
rejected
you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. . . . Now
then, obey
their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways
of the
king who shall reign over them.”

Spectacular Sin: “Your
Wickedness Is Great”

So Samuel says in 1 Samuel 12:13b:
“Behold, the LORD has set
a king over you.” Then he calls on the Lord to give them a
sign in thunder and
rain, and he describes their sin as a great wickedness. Verse 17:
“Is it not
wheat harvest today? I will call upon the LORD, that he may send
thunder and
rain. And you shall know and see that your
wickedness is great, which you have done in the sight of the
LORD, in asking
for yourselves a king.”

And just to make sure we
don’t miss the holy work of God
through this unholy wickedness, Paul, in Acts 13:20-22, makes explicit
that it
was God who gave Israel
her first king. “[God] gave them judges until Samuel the
prophet. Then they
asked for a king, and God gave them Saul the
son of Kish,
a
man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years. And when he had removed
him, he raised up David to be their king.”
We have seen this repeatedly in the spectacular sins of history. Man
meant it
for evil, and God meant it for good.

What Are We to Learn from
This?

So the question is this: If God saw
this spectacular sin
coming and he knew that he would permit it and thus made the kingship
of Israel
part of his plan to glorify Christ as the
King of kings, why not just make kingship part of Israel’s
governance from the
beginning? Why not make Moses the first king? Then Joshua and so on?
Why did
God start with himself as the king, and then bring human kingship into Israel’s
history later through a spectacular sin? What are we to learn from this?

At least six things.

1) We Are
Stiff-Necked, Rebellious, and Unthankful.

We should learn from this how
stiff-necked and rebellious
and unthankful we are. That’s why 1 Samuel 12 begins the way
it does reminding
the people how God saved them from Egypt and then gave them the
promised land
and then rescued them from evil kings. And each time they forget God
and go
after other things. That is not just the story of Israel.
It’s the story of humanity.
It’s the story of my life and your life. Even as Christians,
we are not
steadfast in our affections for God. We have thankful days and
unthankful days.
And even our thankful days are not as thankful as they should be. Just
think of
how joyful and thankful you would be if your heart responded to God
himself and
his ten thousand gifts with the admiration and gratitude that he is
worthy of.
So God gives us pictures of ourselves in stories like this. He allows
his
people to drift into this kind of ungrateful and idolatrous seasons so
that
every mouth may be stopped and the whole world held accountable before
God
(Romans 3:19).

2. God Is
Faithful to
His Own Name.

We should learn from this how
faithful God is to his own
name. Look at verse 22: “It has pleased the LORD to make you
a people for
himself.” What is the deepest foundation of God’s
faithfulness? His allegiance
to his own name. His jealousy and zeal for his own glory. Read the
verse slowly
and thoughtfully: “The LORD will not forsake his people, for
his great name’s
sake.” It does not say for “their great
name’s sake” but for his great name’s
sake. God is totally committed to upholding the worth and truth and
righteousness of his own name. So stories like this are in the Bible to
teach
us that God’s ways are governed by an infinite wisdom guided
by the infinite
worth of the name of God.

3) Grace
Flows to
Sinners from God’s Supreme Allegiance to His Name.

We should learn from this how
amazingly grace for sinners
like us flows from God’s supreme allegiance to his own name
in the midst of
sin. Look at the amazing illustration of this in verses 19-22. In verse
19, the
people are terrified at the spectacular sin they have committed against
God.
They say, “Pray for your servants to the LORD your God, that
we may not die,
for we have added to all our sins this evil, to ask for ourselves a
king.” The
words that follow this are a picture of free gospel grace to sinners.
Samuel
said to the people (v. 20), “Do not be afraid; you have done
all this evil.”

Stop right there and be amazed.
“Do not be afraid; you have
done all this evil.” Isn’t that a misprint?
Shouldn’t it say, “Be
afraid; you have done all this evil.”
But it says, “Do not be afraid; you have done all this
evil.” That is pure
grace. God’s grace treats us not the way we deserve:
“Be afraid; you have done
all this evil.” But better than we deserve: “Do not
be afraid; you have done
all this evil.”

How can this be? What is the basis of
this grace? Not us! We
have only done evil. What then? We’ve seen it already. Verse
22: Don’t be
afraid “for the LORD will not forsake his people, for his
great name’s sake.”
God’s allegiance to his own name is the foundation of his
faithfulness to you.
If God ever forsook his supreme allegiance to himself, there would be
no grace
for us. If he based his kindness to us on our worth, there would be no
kindness
to us. We are stiff-necked, rebellious, and ungrateful. Free, unmerited
grace
is our only hope to be otherwise. And the basis of that grace is not
the worth
of our name, but the infinite worth of God’s name. Recall 2
Timothy 2:13: “If
we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny
himself.” God means
for us to learn from this spectacular sin that the grace of our
salvation is
ultimately based not on our value to him, but his value to himself.

4) Kingship
Belongs
Only to God.

We should learn from God’s
way of bringing about the
kingship in Israel
that kingship belongs only to the Lord. God inaugurates his
relationship with Israel
with no human king in order to make
crystal clear that that only God should be the king of Israel.
Only
God is king. When Israel
asked for a king, they were rejecting this truth. God says it plainly
in 1
Samuel 8:7: “They have rejected me from being king over
them.” If God had begun
the history of Israel
with
Moses and Joshua being the first kings, it would not be clear that only
God can
be the king of Israel.
He will have no human competitors.

5) A God-Man
Must Be
King.

Therefore, we should learn from
God’s way of installing a
human king that his purposes are to inaugurate a line of human kings
who would
all fail until the king came who was not only man but also God, for
only God
can be king of Israel. In giving Israel
a human king, God did not
change his mind about only God being the rightful King of Israel. The
point is
that God alone is King of Israel, and there is coming a king, a Son of
David,
who will not fail like the others. He will not be just another sinful
man. He
will be the God-man.

The last question on the lips of
Jesus that silences the
Pharisees is based on Psalm 110:1, where David says, “The
LORD [Yahweh] says to
my Lord [the coming king and Messiah]: ‘Sit at my right hand,
until I make your
enemies your footstool.’” Jesus quotes this and
then asks his adversaries, “If
then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” In other
words, for those who
have ears to hear, Jesus is more than the son of David. He is more than
a
merely human king. “In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God,
and the Word was God. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among
us, and
we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the
Father” (John 1:1,
14). Only God can be the final rightful king of Israel.
That’s the way it began.
That is the way it ends. Jesus Christ is divine-human king of Israel.

6) The King
Died for
His People.

Finally, we should learn from the way
God brought a human
king to Israel
that there needed to be a human king. Only God can be the rightful king
of Israel.
But
there needed to be a human king. Why? Because for God to have a people
to rule
and to love, who were not in hell because of their sins, the king had
to die
for the people. And God can’t die. Man can die. So God had
planned not only
that only God can be the rightful king of Israel,
but the rightful king of Israel
must die in the place of the people. So the king of Israel
is the God-man so that the king can
be God, but he is also the God-man
so that the king can die.

When Samuel said, “Do not
be afraid, you rebellious,
stiff-necked, ungrateful sinners; you have done all this
evil” (1 Samuel
12:20), what was the basis of this grace? It was value of
God’s name. “The LORD
will not forsake his people, for his great name’s
sake” (v. 22). The upholding
and the vindication of God’s name is the basis of grace. And
where was that
vindication most decisively and finally displayed? Answer: in the cross
of
Christ. Romans 3:25: “God put [Christ] forward as a
propitiation by his blood,
to be received by faith. This was to show God’s
righteousness, because in his
divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.”

At the Cross, For His
Name’s
Sake

Indeed he had. On this very day when
the people deserved to
be destroyed for asking for a king, God forgave them and passed over
their
sins—for his name’s sake. But you can’t
sweep sin under the rug of the universe
and still uphold your name as a righteous and holy God. Sin must be
dealt with.
It must be punished. And it was, when Jesus died.

The only reason that sinful people
like us can have a king
as great and glorious and powerful and good and holy and wise as Jesus
without
being consumed for our sin is that God planned for the king to die for
his
subjects and rise again. In every Gospel, Jesus is asked just before he
dies,
“Are the king of the Jews?” And he answers,
“You have said so” (Matthew 27:11;
Mark 15:2; Luke 23:3; John 18:33).

The Coming King of All

And not just the king of the Jews,
but the king of
all—especially those who trust him. He is seated at the right
hand of the
Father today until all his enemies are put under his feet and all his
elect are
gathered in from the all the peoples of the earth. Then the end will
come. And
Christ “will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but
to save those who
are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28). And
“on his robe and on his thigh
he has a name written”—not king of the Jews, but
“King of kings and Lord of
lords” (Revelation 19:16). Amen. Come, King Jesus.