Give Us A King or Give Us Liberty?

God loves to teach His people because He wants us to become adults. We cannot become His peers, but when God came down and became a human, He made it possible for us to become His friends. God has all power and could make us just and good, but then we would cease to be persons. 

He allows us to choose. He makes our growth slow, because this slow change allows us to maintain our personality. We are not “zapped,” but born again. The “new person” slowly grows within us, bringing justice, goodness, and beauty into our lives.

But isn’t there an easier way? Couldn’t God just “zap” us and make us good? He could, but God loves us too much to lose us! He heals as quickly as He can and keeps the person He loves the person He loves. We fight His will and He allows this as well, because He wants us to choose. 

His gift to us is liberty . . . even the liberty to deny him forever if we choose. We have to live with the results. It is a bad idea to reject the Good, the Truth, and Beauty, but if we will, then we can. Mostly we are thankful for freedom that God gives us, but we wish He wouldn’t give freedom to them. 

Those other people, the aliens, the strangers, the sinners . . . we would like God to show them some muscle. Of course, God does punish evil, but evil is also complicated, infecting us all. Sometimes He starts house cleaning where He chooses.

When God set up government for His people, Israel, He wanted to teach them self-government. They had no “king” like other nations because God wanted to be king to each member of the people of God. There was as much liberty as people of the time could grasp, but even that was “too different.”

They chose to place themselves under a strong man who would make Israel like the other nations and restore the greatness of the people. Liberty was hard, every man kept doing what was right in his own eyes, and so they fell back to a king. Their leader Samuel warned them that the strong man would go bad:

And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: he will take your sons, and appoint them unto him, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and they shall run before his chariots: and he will appoint them unto him for captains of thousands and captains of fifties; and he will set some to plow his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and the instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectioneries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your olive-yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not answer you in that day.

But the people refused to hearken unto the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; that we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

Nobody listened to Samuel. They wanted a tough guy who would fight their battles. They got Saul and it set Israel back in the learning process for decades. God gives us what we think we want if we will not listen. When we choose not to be free, we hope to remain children, but end up slaves to the strong man. Humanity has done this many times. The French tried to get free in the Revolution, but chose a strong man in Napoleon. He started a world war in the name of “liberty,” but glorified himself. The people of France voted to be powerful and became slaves to the glory of Napoleon’s Empire.

Thank God when the people of the newly freed United States faced troubles, they chose a Constitution over a king, self-rule over a strongman.

Millennia have passed since Israel chose a king over self-rule and centuries since France voted for Napoleon. God is still trying to write His law into each human heart. He is still trying to teach us self-governance. He still wants a free people.

What will we chose?