PaddlingPadre

In First Samuel chapter eight, the Israelites come to Samuel in his old age and demand that he appoint a king to rule over them, just as the nations around them are ruled by a king. This is not, to Samuel’s eyes, a good thing, and indeed God himself is displeased by this request. You are not the one they are rejecting, he assures Samuel, but rather they are rejecting me as their king, says the Lord. Nevertheless, after having warned the people of all the evils that will follow when a king is placed over them, Samuel, following God’s instruction, listens to the people’s plea, and anoints Saul of the tribe of Benjamin to rule over God’s chosen people.

The kingship of Saul proves as disastrous as Samuel had warned it would be, as time and time again Saul’s rule will come to constitute a rejection of God’s lordship over Israel, an embracing of worldly ways of thinking and of acting such that God and the covenant come to occupy a secondary place to power politics. The kingship of Saul, the kingship for which the Israelites had clamored, leads the people to a sort of spiritual death, a spiritual death which was finally consummated on Mount Gilboa, where Saul together with his sons were slain by the Philistines and the army of Israel put to flight.

It was in the wake of this disaster that, beginning with the house of Judah, and then eventually the other tribes as well, the Israelites came to David in Hebron and anointed him king of Israel. This was, of course, in keeping with God’s own will, as we heard in the first reading, as the Lord says to David: You shall shepherd my people Israel and shall be commander of Israel.

The Lord says this to David because in David, as in so many other instances where God’s sinful children have strayed from walking in God’s plan, God is stepping into the mess that the people have made in their sinfulness and is fixing it from the inside. The advent of the kingship in Israel was a disaster because it constituted a rejection of God’s own kingship, but rather than abolish the kingship, as might easily have been done after the death of Saul, God instead raises up David, a man after his own heart, to succeed to the kingship, and to govern the people in justice and in truth. In other words, God redeems the kingship of Israel through David.

Of course, David is not a perfect king, and his sons were less perfect still, and beginning already with Solomon they fell into idolatry and wickedness, with only a few, such as Hezekiah and Josiah, drawing near to the righteousness of David. And so, when one looks at the Davidic kingship in itself, stretching from David to Zedekiah, the last king before the exile, one does not see there a final and definitive redemption of kingship. For David might well have been a man after God’s own heart, but in his rule the kingship of God was hardly restored, as even the House of David came to persecute the right worship of God and to mistreat his prophets.

And so, the kingship of David, a kingship by which the sin of the people in asking Samuel to anoint a king to rule over them was to be reversed and redeemed, must, like so many things in the Old Testament, be understood as a sort of prophecy which long awaited its fulfillment. For the righteousness of David was only ever a passing thing, but in its passing it presaged the reign of a future king whose rule and righteousness would not pass away.

David was far from the only prophetic sign of this future king. Isaiah prophesied that a shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots, and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.  Similarly, Daniel, in interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great statue of gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay, which was struck and utterly destroyed by a stone which grew into a great mountain that filled the entire earth, prophesied that in future days the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed nor left to another people, but will rather crush all other kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.

And of what other king could they be speaking, if not he who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, in whom were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers? For observe: Christ is born of David’s line, God himself is sprung from David’s loins. In ancient days, the people had rejected the eternal and universal kingship of God by their preference for an earthly king to rule over them, but now God himself has taken that human kingship to himself so that he once again is hailed as king over Israel, ruling with the same kingship by which he governs the universe, a kingship that shall never pass away nor be overthrown.

As in Daniel’s vision, the kingship of Christ, that humble stone which struck the mighty statue which symbolized the great kingdoms of the earth (and most especially the Roman Empire), begins as a seemingly small and insignificant thing – in the humiliation of the cross Jesus does not appear as a king. And yet, from that moment forth, his kingdom has not ceased to grow and fill the whole earth, and indeed the day will come when the vision of Daniel will be complete, and the kingship of Christ will be manifested in glory and power on the last day.

Yet until that day, we exist in the in-between, in the already-but-not-yet which is so characteristic of our Christian hope. For truly Christ is even now King of the Universe, and yet he allows, in his goodness and mercy, this period of time in which we might repent of our sins and spread the good news of Christ’s salvation to an unbelieving world, so that we might have cause for rejoicing, and not for fear, on that great and terrible day when the Lord comes.

And so, what this means for us is that we must even now bear witness to the kingship of Christ. Do not be like the Israelites in the days of Saul, trusting more in worldly princes than in God, do not put your politics or your career ahead of your religion, do not give yourself over to sin, which is rebellion against Christ and his rule. Rather, let the holiness, faithfulness, and sobriety of your life be a sign to the world that our ultimate allegiance as Christians lies with Christ, with him who is before all things and in whom all things hold together, the Son of God and Son of David, King of the Universe.