A Thought on the Kingdom

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.
Judges 21:25 (NIV)

That statement comes right at the end of the book of Judges in the Bible and I have always found it interesting. It is often taken to mean that such a situation is bad, that it leads to chaos and confusion, but it is really just a recording of fact without qualification. There is no value judgement in the statement and there is none in its context, the verses that precede it. It's a bald statement of fact.

The placement of this verse is very revealing of its intent. It is a summary of all that has gone before in the book of Judges, an attempt to put the thing in a nutshell. Judges records the history of Israel from the time they settled in the Promised Land until the moment when God allowed them to have a king. We should remember that He granted this reluctantly, finally yielding to the Israelites' desire to be ruled in the same way as the nations around them. As far as God was concerned, it was a "second best" option, a less than perfect solution to the problem of government. He warned them of the dire consequences that would result from their desire for a king but still they insisted. And one must presume that He let them have their way merely to teach them a lesson.

Why were the Israelites so bent on having a king to rule them? To us, with our belief in the principles of democracy, it seems a strange choice, especially when we look at that statement at the end of Judges and think that it sounds very much like our own situation. But we need to remember that democracy had not been invented at the time. Some unknown little Greek city states were shortly to experiment with all sorts of governmental systems, one of which was to become the foundation of democracy (although it was not democracy as we know it, being reserved for successful males and ignoring females and slaves). At the time of Judges, however, all of this was in the future.

So democracy was not an option for the Israelites. They had a very limited range of choices indeed: either what they were already experiencing or a king. It is true that some nations at the time were ruled by god-kings or by a priesthood, yet the effect was the same as a monarchy. We may define such a system as a theocracy but the reality was that a mere mortal was always the object into which all the supposed powers of a god were poured and he ruled as a king. This was not an option for the Israelites; they had direct experience of the Living God and knew that He was not embodied in the flesh of any of them.

They chose to have a king rather than continue in the system they had, a system that is the sole instance of true theocracy in the history of mankind. They were ruled by God. And the problem for the Israelites was that, for most of the time, He left them pretty much to their own devices, just as described in the verse I have quoted. Every man did as he saw fit. Certainly, there was a priesthood, but it did not attempt to set itself up as a ruler; it functioned purely as a religious organization, acting as a mediator between the people and God. And there was no representative of God who sat upon a throne and told them what to do; nor did God come down and sit on that throne. To anyone observing, it must have seemed that Israel was completely leaderless, a ragged bunch of desert nomads who existed in a state of disorder.

That was a part of the Israelites' problem; they were acutely aware of the mockery and contempt of other nations. And their apparent lack of organization made them seem easy prey to enemies. They were repeatedly assaulted by the nations around them.

It was at those times of crisis that God's leadership became suddenly apparent. He would raise up a hero (known as a judge, since they would sometimes continue after the crisis as a mediator of disputes - hence the name of the book) who would succeed in gathering enough of an army to defeat the invaders. This happened time after time; on numerous occasions the Israelites would find themselves teetering on the edge of destruction, only to be rescued at the last moment by God's intervention in the form of an unexpected leader.

And this was the real cause of the Israelites' ultimate dissatisfaction with the whole theocracy thing: that God loves those "at the last moment" scenarios (understandably, since they enable Him to give demonstration of the fact that He really is in charge). But they are scary times for mere mortals. To put it in modern terms, the Israelites had a crisis of faith. Their trust in God had been stretched beyond endurance and they wanted something more tangible to rely on, something or someone they could see and touch, someone they could heap responsibility on and say, "Oh, the king will tell us what to do."

No wonder God was not all that keen on the idea. His people were, in effect, saying that their faith was no longer in Him. Were He not God, I would suspect that there was an element of revenge in His giving in to their pleas.

So he allowed them to have their king and the rest, as they say, is history. But that short, simple phrase still fascinates - "everyone did as he saw fit." What lessons and wisdom are in those words and the period they refer to - particularly for Christians, who now inhabit a Kingdom governed in the same way as were the Israelites of so long ago.

What, you say we live in a democracy? Not Christians; we are but sojourners here and citizens of another Kingdom entirely.