Scriptures call us to turn and trust in God in uncertain times, yet political voices beckon for our trust. What should we do as we face a chaotic world in a most unusual year?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you tonight as we begin a brand new series entitled Like the Other Nations. It’s hard to do anything right now without being bombarded with politics. The presidential election seems to be consuming all of us and our constant preoccupation. It fills us with fear and uncertainty. And as we face these things, we need to turn to the only one who can give us certainty and peace. So let’s go ahead and open tonight by coming before our God in prayer. Then we’re going to look at the story of King Saul and through that story, better understand what we really should care about and how we should really focus our hearts during a time of an election season. Let’s go ahead and open in prayer.
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you that you are with us even when things feel uncertain. Lord, would you be with us tonight? Would you protect us? Would you guide us as people seeking to understand who to vote for and what to do in elections? Would you be with our nation and our world? Would you help us to desire what you desire and to look to you more than anything else? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We open tonight with scenes from the 20th century, particularly from World War II and the Cold War. And I selected those scenes because if you think about them and you think about what happened with the rise of Nazism and later with the rise of communism or at least the expansion of it, both of those movements, what they were really looking for was to claim the place of God, to suggest that we as human beings can set up the solution to our world. Whether it’s on the right or the left, what we see is that the claim is if we just follow this political solution, everything’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to work. And most of all, those who support that movement are going to do well. It’s seeking after human strength and human solutions and oftentimes then finding the other, those that we can accuse of being the problem.
What brought this to mind when I think about our current situation is that if you really think about it for a moment and you took out the policy specifics, what we see in our political situation today is exactly the same thing from everyone involved. A constant labeling of the opposite side as the problem and the side that’s speaking at that moment as the solution to all of our problems, to unemployment, to disease, to all the uncertainty and fear we face. As we think about that, we fall into an age-old temptation to think that we can find a solution if we just find the right human being to lead us.
That’s what the Israelites did as well. See, the thing that things go wrong and we seek to follow what we might call other nations. The Israelites early in the period of Israel before the kings looked at the other nations and they had these strong kings who could courageously represent them, who could go out and lead the people in battle. And the Israelites said, but we don’t have that. Instead, we have Samuel. Samuel is great. And if you recall, Samuel is a judge. Samuel represents God. He actually speaks God’s words to the people. But Samuel is growing old. And as we turn to 1 Samuel chapter 8, we learn that his sons aren’t very trustworthy. Let’s go ahead and jump in there and see why the people of Israel were feeling so uncertain and why they were looking for the other nations to offer the solution.
1 Samuel chapter 8 says, “When Samuel became old, he made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his firstborn son was Joel, and the name of his second was Abijah, and they were judges in Beersheba. Yet his sons did not walk in his ways, but turned aside after gain. They took bribes and perverted justice.”
So we have a case where we have this man who has faithfully served the Lord, who has actually been something that we don’t have, which is someone who is leading the people of Israel. And they can talk to him and he can actually go before God and come back with a prophetic word from God and say, this is exactly what the Lord says. This is what you need to do. This is where you need to send the army. This is how we need to run the nation. That’s pretty amazing if you think about it.
But they look at him, and he’s growing old, and they look at his sons, whom he’s using as delegates as he’s growing old and it’s becoming harder to travel, and they don’t have the same values as Samuel. In fact, what we read is that they’ve been perverting justice, that they’ve been looking out for themselves rather than the people. Later on, when Samuel reflects on his life before the nation, he asks them, “Have I ever taken anything from you? Have I ever worked to my own advantage?” And the people say, “Absolutely not.” But that’s not true of his sons. And so the people are filled with fear. Samuel is going to be gone soon. They don’t know who’s going to lead them.
And so they think of those kings, those strong men around them in other nations, and they say, we need a solution because there are all these other nations and they seem to be doing okay and they’re growing stronger and Samuel’s going to be gone and we are in trouble. We feel uncertain. We need to know how the nation’s going to operate. We need to have strong leadership. We need to have leadership with integrity and Samuel’s sons don’t have it.
Those are the fears that are driving them. And fears and uncertainties drive us too. And that’s our question that we need to be thinking about tonight. What problems and fears are we letting drive us? Maybe it’s the virus. Maybe it’s your job situation. There’s so much uncertainty in a year like 2020. We have lots of reason to fear, just like the Israelites did. And that fear was driving them and those fears drive us.
Maybe it’s worry over this election and is the candidate that you oppose going to take away your freedoms? Is he going to change our interactions with different people? Is he going to change the way that churches can operate? Is he going to change what America stands for? We hear this about both candidates from those that oppose them. And every single time what we hear is that if you just vote for me, whoever me is, all that will go away. You vote for one candidate A and all the bad stuff that candidate B is going to cause goes away and vice versa.
Now the people of Israel, this is the sort of uncertainty there. And just like we don’t know who’s going to be leading us in a few months, they don’t know who’s going to be leading them after Samuel dies. They feel this uncertainty and they start off okay. They say, okay, we need to talk to the Lord. And again, Samuel provides a direct connection to God. They can come and talk to him and he will speak prophetic words from God.
But they come before the Lord, just as we’re called to come before God in prayer. And we read about that in 1 Samuel 8, once again, in verse 4 and following. It says, “Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah.” So the leadership of Israel gathers together and they come to Samuel with their concern, with their uncertainty.
And the first thing we need to say is this is what we should do when we feel uncertain. If you’re feeling uncertain right now, if I am, what should I do? What should you do? We should come before our God. We should come before him and pray and seek his wisdom. We should be in his word seeking his wisdom.
Note that even Jesus does this. When the Son is facing the cross, what does he do in the Garden of Gethsemane? He comes before his Father in prayer. And just like that, we are called to come before our God and to seek his wisdom.
See, the problem isn’t wanting to escape uncertainty. The problem isn’t wanting to improve things when they’re bad. The problem that Israel is about to fall into, and the problem that we so often fall into, is putting our hope in the thing that we decide is going to improve our lives and our world, rather than in our God. And that’s where they fall into this trap of wanting to be like other nations. As I was saying a moment ago, they’re looking to the world, they see these kings, and they say, you know the solution? If they have these strong kings and we have Samuel, but Samuel’s going away and all that’s left are his two sons, we need a king like the other nations have. And that’s what we see as we go on in this passage.
It says the Israelite leader said to Samuel, “Behold, you are old, your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations.”
But the thing displeased Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel, “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.”
You see, here is the problem. We end up trusting the tool rather than the one who made the tool. We end up trusting in politics and our favorite political leaders, rather than trusting in the one who created those leaders and created our ability to have a political system.
We’re told in scripture that God has placed leaders in our world to lead us. So politics is, in some sense, even if it doesn’t feel like it, at times, it is a gift from God, a way that he enables us to function in the world. But it’s a tool. Our trust is in the tool. It’s the one who made the tool.
I remember back in seminary, some of my friends, very rightly, were disgusted with the state of the church and politics. They were reflecting back on decades of political involvement. And again, we can see this in both sides of the aisle, but they were particularly disgusted with what they saw in their own churches, where the churches had cozied up to certain politicians and certain political parties. And they didn’t want to do that anymore.
They recognized that scripture doesn’t call us to be partisans that simply advocate for a party. Rather, again, it’s the tool. We trust in the God who made the tool. And they recognized that. And that was so encouraging to me, until I saw what was happening.
You see, what happened, at least in many cases, with many of these people that I would count as friends, was that they didn’t say, “Okay, we can’t trust in this political party because that’s just a tool, and we need to trust in God, but we can’t trust in the other political party either.” No, they didn’t do that. They ended up simply switching political allegiances.
And see, that’s what our society, what our world wants us to do. If we find out that we can’t trust one political party, we simply turn and we trust a different political party. We’ve gotten that mentality that there are these two choices, and that one of them deserves our trust, and one of them deserves our utter rejection and utter hatred.
And so I watched my friends who were rightly seeing from scripture that people had wrongly tied themselves to politics rather than the word of God. But instead of fleeing that, they did the same thing just with a different politician and a different political party.
They almost had the right idea. And while that struck me, I know that I do the same thing too. Maybe not in that particular situation, but all of us are constantly ending up placing our trust in the tools that are in the world that God has given us rather than in our God.
And that should lead us to a huge question, which is, why do we want to be like the world? Why do we want to follow the world when we can follow the one who created the world and who promises the restoration of that world, who promises a solution when our world seems so broken and hurt so much?
We look at 1 John chapter 2. John reflects on this. He says,
“Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.”
Here, friends, is the centerpiece of our problem. When we trust the tool rather than the maker of the tool, we turn from God’s love, God’s faithfulness, God’s help for us, God’s plan to restore us and to make us who we were meant to be, and instead we say, “I’m going to settle for this lesser thing. I’m going to settle for this because it seems to be a solution to what feels so uncertain in my life.”
Reminds me, maybe you’ve done this. I’ve done this more than once. You go into a room and say your lamp won’t turn on. You flip the switch and nothing happens and you have this lamp on the table and it won’t turn on. So you think, okay, I need to go find a light bulb.
So I’ll go out and I’ll find a light bulb and you start rifling through the light bulbs trying to find the right size light bulb, the right wattage, all these things, and you get the light bulb and you unscrew the old light bulb and if you’re like me, you always shake it and see if you can hear it jingle and I’m never quite sure. Sometimes I shake it and I think it jingles, but I’m not quite sure.
So I set the light bulb down, I screw another light bulb in, I hit the switch and the light doesn’t come on. And then I think, hmm, I wonder if the switch on the light itself is off and not just the wall plate. And I turn the switch a couple of times and what do you know, the light comes on.
It wasn’t the light bulb at all. That tool, that light bulb was perfectly fine. I can take the one I just put in out and put the old one in and it comes on. But I was trusting in the tool as being the solution. I’m in the dark and it feels dark and it feels sort of uncertain, and I take out that light thinking that another bulb is going to fix that lamp and give me brightness.
I might say it’s my bright idea. I think that’s what’s going to do it. And in fact, I’m still in the dark because the real problem is that little stem on the lamp that needs to be turned on.
And that’s what we do. That’s what we’re constantly being called into in this political sphere. We’re hearing all the ads and we listen to talk radio or we turn on the TV or we go on the internet, we read social media, and it sounds like the world’s about to cave in. Unless the candidate, the person posting is advocating for wins.
And that person is trusting in that tool, that politician, rather than God in that.
And when we just buy into that and we start following that, we’re doing the same thing. And it’s not because tools are bad. It’s not that we should be apathetic and not care. It’s not that the people of Israel should have said, well, since we’re only trusting God, it doesn’t matter if Samuel’s sons are doing wrong. We should just live in a chaotic world and not care about it.
You see, their problem was not that they came to Samuel and said, “We’re worried you’re getting old and your sons aren’t like you. They don’t have integrity like you do.” The problem wasn’t that. It was the next part. “So give us a king like the other nations.”
Samuel, the tool that we think we’re about to inherit when you die isn’t going to work. So give us this tool, which we know will make us safe and secure. When what they really should have been saying is, “Samuel, we need God’s guidance. We need to know what’s going to come next when you die. We want to do what our true king wants us to do.”
And so God says to Samuel, “They’re not really rejecting you. They’re rejecting me.” That’s our temptation, friends, that we don’t reject just some particular political leader. We end up rejecting God because we’re trusting in the next political leader to make everything okay.
How many times do we do this? We follow the same pattern as Israel. God rehearses this pattern in verse eight of our passage. He says to Samuel that “According to all the deeds that they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt, and even to this day forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you.”
We slide from one wrong idea to another. And when we slide from one political party to another, we take our trust from a politician that maybe we don’t think has done enough or hasn’t accomplished what we wanted to some other politician and think, well, maybe this one will do it.
Or if I just get enough of my favorite politicians into office or this or that or the other thing with politics, I’m just saying, can we be like the other nations? Can we find the politician who’s going to make us strong against those other nations? Can we find the politician who’s going to implement policies of the nations that we admire most?
And whichever direction that might lead us on the ballot, if that is our operating principle, and it isn’t first, can we come before our God and seek our certainty in him? We’re ultimately going to be terribly disappointed because we’re trusting the tool and not the maker of the tool.
We need to ask, who are our other nation models that we think if we could just be like them, we’d be better off? And not just in politics. This is in life in general.
Maybe your other nation is your neighbor next door who seems to have a better life than you do. Everything seems to be going better. Maybe it’s your coworker who seems to be getting favors at work and you think, if I could just be like the other nations, just be like that coworker, I could just have that position.
Every time we do that and we think, if I could just have, or I could just elect, or I could just be in this position, rather than thinking, if I can just follow my God, we’re setting ourselves up for failure and disappointment.
That’s the problem in this election season. The voices we hear want us to think our solution to fear is in a particular person or party. And every single one of them is going to fail. As John reflected on the world, everything in this world is going to pass away, but God remains and his plan remains. And it’s in that context that we can wrestle with the questions of who is best suited for office.
And we do it because we want to be as faithful as possible to God’s word, not because we fear that somehow God will lose control of the world if our side doesn’t triumph.
What happens when we place our trust in the wrong places? Well, what happens frequently in Scripture is that it ends up coming at the cost of one’s neighbors. And that happens to us too. When we think that if we can just achieve certain successes or have certain political accomplishments or whatever else it may be, what do we do?
We think, I need to accomplish this, or my party needs to accomplish this, or even, sadly, my church needs to accomplish this. And these people, or the people that have this ideology, or this neighbor who has this ugly fence, or whatever it might be, is getting in the way, is preventing me from that.
And so we quit seeing those people as neighbors, other people who desperately need the gospel. We start to see them as enemies who are in the way of the things that we want and need, our escape from fear and uncertainty.
And in that, that feeds an increasing reversal of the place of God and politics in our lives, or of work and God in our lives, or insert something else. Whatever it is that’s driving you right now, whatever fears and uncertainties are most dominant on your mind, when we allow those to take over, instead of God being the one that we recognize as in control and all these other things serving underneath that, instead we start to almost turn it.
It’s funny how this happens. We start to see that somehow God happens to affirm whatever it’s going to take for us to achieve what we think will give us peace. And it hurts our relationship with our God.
What really matters in life is that we recognize who the true king is, that Jesus came, he lived, he suffered, he died for us, that he has triumphed over death, that he is the one who remains, his kingdom will never end.
And if we place our trust in him and him alone, whatever comes, whatever political winds blow in and blow out, whatever leaders we think are going to solve everything and don’t, whatever leaders we wish would win and haven’t or won’t, there will be consequences in the world, but we know eternity is secure.
The problem is when we want to be like other nations, and that’s what we’re going to be thinking about over these coming weeks. How can we not simply seek to be like other nations, but we can seek to be like our God?
Because the more we seek to be like our God, the more the church seeks to be like God and not simply the most prosperous organization of organizations, the more other people see that, and the more we get a foretaste, a preview of the true kingdom.
The only thing that’s going to eliminate that uncertainty, the only thing that’s going to eliminate the insecurities of life and the pain of life, that’s Jesus’s kingdom.
So as we go through this series, we’re going to think about different aspects of that, those things that are like other nations that we yearn for, and what happens when we place our trust in them.
Because we’re going to follow the life of Saul, and through the life of Saul, we see a textbook case of politics in general, of what happens in life in general when we place our trust in the tool and not the one who made the tool.
And through that, may it be that we don’t seek to be like other nations, that we don’t seek to be like other people, that we don’t seek to be like other organizations, that we don’t seek to be like anything other than God.
The only one we should seek to be like, the only one whose promises will happen, the only one who is true and faithful.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Lord, I confess that too often I get tied up in the fear and uncertainty we see in this world that we see with this political system. I think about who I would like to see win the election, and it’s easy to start fearing what’s going to happen if things go differently than I would like.
I think probably a lot of us are feeling that regardless of who it is that we’re rooting for. And in that, Lord, I confess that I’m trusting in the wrong things. Lord, help us not to trust in those you’ve made to do your work, but to trust in you.
Help us not to seek to be like the world, but to be like you. And Lord, give us wisdom as we approach this season, that we would seek after those who speak your truth, and that even as we do, though, that we would keep our trust in you and not in them.
For you are the one who is sure and whose hope is secure. And we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, we’re going to continue this series next week, and as we do, we’re going to be thinking about how we get caught up in appearances, things that look good on the surface. As we compare our leaders to other nations, whatever those metaphorical nations may be.
As we think about the aspects of our life we’d like to see improved, and we see things that look promising. How do we get caught up in that, rather than seeking what God really cares about? We do it too often. So I hope you’ll join me at 7 p.m. next Monday night for us to talk about that.
But I sure hope to see you before then on Friday, that’s October 16th, at 7 p.m. We have Faithtoberfest. It is going to be amazing.
We have an incredible group of local artists who are going to share music with us, praising our God. We have some others who are coming and sharing other gifts. We have skits. We have others just sharing encouragement from God’s Word. I am confident that if you make time to come on Friday, you’re going to feel encouraged.
And we have some prizes, so we can have fun with those as well. In fact, if you go to faithtoberfest.org ahead of Faithtoberfest, anytime this week, you can gather extra chances to win prizes.
So I do hope you’ll go to faithtoberfest.org, register for an account, and look forward to that this week. In fact, you can earn chances to win prizes simply by going on there and sharing about Faithtoberfest with others.
Also, we have Men’s Bible Study beginning a brand new series on Hebrews this week on Thursday night at 7 p.m. I’d love to see you there. If you have any questions about any of these things, please feel free to leave it in the comments.
Shoot me an email. You can always use the email address you see on screen. I would love to hear from you. I’d love to hear if I can be praying for you. Once again, thank you for joining me tonight. I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and I look forward to seeing you next week as we continue our series. Have a blessed week.