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February 29, 2004
The Flexibility of God
The Flexibility of God
I Samuel 8: 1-9 / Psalm 7: 1-10
Luke 2: 1-4
February 29th, 2004
This morning I ask that you think with me about the flexibility of God and how we depend on it. One of our wonderful Reformed confessions defines God as “unchangeable” in various ways—in his wisdom, power, justice, goodness, holiness, and truth.
But God is flexible in other ways, perhaps because of His unchangeable wisdom and justice. God is goal-oriented. He works all things according to the counsel of His will toward good ends. Wisdom knows when to bend in the flow of time. Remember, God created time too. Justice responds to need. God is unchangeable in His wisdom and justice that He works out in the flow of time.
There is evidence in the Bible of the flexibility of God.
The most famous incidence of God’s flexibility is described in Exodus 32. There God is about to put an end to his people, Israel, after they worshipped the golden calf Aaron made for them. Moses had been up on the mountain forty days. They were tired of waiting for God and Moses. They told Moses’ brother, Aaron, to make them a golden calf to bow down to and say “Thanks for bringing us out of Egypt.”
Aaron did it, becoming a symbol of the tragedy of compliant religious leaders among God’s people from that time on. It’s so tempting to ask, “What do folk like these days, and then mold for them a golden calf?”
God said to Moses, “I have seen this people . . . a stiff-necked people; now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; but of you I will make a great nation.”
But Moses did not leave God alone. He implored God to spare Israel. He offered his own life in exchange for theirs. Moses said to God, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the offer to start again with him. They would be known as the children of Moses, not children of Israel. God relented. The Bible tells us, “And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do to his people.” Moses was still a descendent of Abraham, so in beginning afresh with Moses, He could still fulfill His promise to Abraham. This is the most vivid illustration in the Old Testament of the flexibility of God.
This morning we read a story that illustrates a different kind of flexibility in God. Here God shows how he takes the willfulness of His people and still unfolds the loving purposes of His perfect will.
The people of Israel had not been in the Promised Land long when they told God’s prophet, Samuel, “We want a king like all the other countries have.” God’s intention was that He would be their king. They said, “No, we want a king in the way other nations have kings.” God was flexible and gave them a king. But their request had consequences.
The immediate and apparent reason why Israel wanted a change of government wasn’t all that bad. God had provided spiritual leaders to show His people how to live. These were called “judges.” Judges were like pastors with civil authority. There were moral as well as civil expectations of judges. They did their work with the assumption that if people knew God’s will for how they should live, they’d do it. Some times it worked that way. But what happens if you get a rum judge, a pastor who is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Samuel was a good man and a good judge, but his sons were not like their father. His sons were judges too but they were not good men. They lived in the southern-most city of Beersheba, far away from dad who made a circuit of four towns in the center of the country.
Like the sons of Eli, in whose home Samuel had lived as a little boy, Samuel’s sons were a disgrace to their calling. They were greedy, took bribes and were not fair. There have always been common features to the abuse of spiritual authority. So the elders of Israel came to Samuel and said, “We want a king like all the other countries have.” Might not there have been other options to the problem of two bad judges?
In the last part of their request, “like all the other countries have,” the elders showed that it was not mere disappointment with Samuel’s sons that motivated them. After all, Samuel was still the main judge, and his principal flaw seems to have been his failure as a father.
It seems that what they really wanted was to be like everyone else. Their uniqueness placed demands on them that grated on them. They continually tugged at these demands over the years. Perhaps they were careless in praying “the Shemah.” We know the celebration of Passover and other feasts ceased. Even the spiritual leaders forgot where to find a Bible. All of this happened so gradually no one noticed how things were slipping.
When I think of the way Israel gradually broke their intimacy with God who brought them out of Egypt, it reminds me of how friendships gradually sour, or how a once enchanting marriage drifts into misery. Friendship requires on-going trust, goodwill, time together, the ability to forgive, and an inclination to seek the other’s good above your own. But something happens, and you discover friendship disintegrating. Maybe the dissolution of a friendship begins with a bad day, one moment of misunderstanding that becomes like a snowball rolling down a hill. It is all so gradual. The friend may become your enemy.
Similarly a marriage that begins with soaring mutual fascination gradually decays so that the face that once would make you happily launch a thousand ships now looks less than ordinary. Two people who have been married a long time will either gradually come closer until they very nearly seem like one flesh, or they will gradually drift apart so that marriage becomes a word synonymous with misery. Once beloved spouses tell stale, crude jokes about marriage because they allowed their own marriage to decay. This was what became of Israel’s relationship with God, who loved and cared for her.
A gravitational pull worked on God’s people then, as it does still. They were called to be a unique people. So are we, if we are Christians. Their uniquenesses evaporated with lack of use. Our has largely evaporated so that Christians are indistinguishable from other people with no religious commitment.
You and I are constantly lured to the way of life of the culture that surrounds us. The steady lure of materialism is a downward pull we do not recognize. It has sucked us in because we have money to spend on ourselves. So the more we have, the more we will spend on ourselves. Our hearts are really cold. We talk more than we respond with generosity.
A gradual loosening of sexual standards has invaded the church at the same pace it has invaded society at large. Pastors like many others today are falling like dominoes.
Sunday as the Lord’s Day has largely lost out to the unchallenged demands of Sunday sports leagues and with the unchallenged assumption that homework takes priority over one hour of Sunday Bible study among high school and college students. How easily we are lured away from a way of life that will make us strong as a congregation, and that will make you strong as a person. The demise of the Lord’s Day is a sign that gratitude to Jesus is fading and mere custom is taking its place.
We say Question 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism with some passion: “In life and in death I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” What’s does “belong to Jesus,” mean? Maybe we really mean that when we die, we trust Jesus will take care of us. But it’s in life too that we say we belong to Him.
Israel could have said their comfort was that they belonged to God too. They wanted to be able to keep saying that, but they wanted the freedom to choose their way of life. They wanted to keep the name brand, “Israel,” and they wanted the perks of name-brand recognition as God’s people, but they wanted to be free of God’s expectations.
God has built into us all a concern with authenticity. We want the real thing and no substitutes. Generic drugs might be OK if they are cheaper and just as good, but not generic cars. We go for upgrades when we can from Fords to a Mercedes, and we won’t stand for a Mercedes symbol on a Ford motorcar. Generic honesty, the kind with lots of flex for convenience may replace explicit honesty for ourselves, though we are intolerant of this in others. Generic faith that claims adherence to a name brand like Presbyterian or Baptist, replaces commitment to Jesus Christ. We use the term “hypocrite” freely when we see mere name brand faith in others. We judge each other where we see our weaknesses in them.
Part of what makes the world go round is our sensitivity to authenticity. This comes from God who wanted authenticity rather than a people content to wear a name brand.
Israel wanted to keep its label, “Israel.” To be Israel meant to have God as King. Yet they wanted a king like every other country had. Why? Couldn’t they see all the defects of a monarchy?
The Lord told Samuel to tell his people that kings are oppressive by nature.
“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots, and he will appoint some . . . to plow his ground and to reap his harvest . . . He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants . . . In that day you will cry out because of your king.”
We don’t care, they said, in effect. We want a king, period! So God gave them a king. This was the first major, nation-changing crisis since the Exodus from Egypt. It was the beginning of the downhill slide that ended with exile.
The first king they got was this charming, modest, apparently perfect candidate for royalty, Saul. He was anything but a power-grubbing potentate. But it wasn’t long before cracks developed in his character. I must save till later to speak of King Saul.
God wanted to be Israel’s king. He was a Father-like king, leading them out of slavery in Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey. He forgave their iniquities and healed their diseases. He fought for them in battle so that their reputation before other nations was of an invincible people. But they wanted a king to be like every other nation.
Having a king meant claiming all else that went with it besides power. Idolatry came with royalty. Even wise King Solomon didn’t know how to keep idols out of Israel. He married foreign princesses who brought their gods with them into Israel. Because as a king, he had to marry a princess. Princesses are often glamorous. Each Israelite king who married a foreign princess welcomed her entourage of gods and ideas into Israel. That’s part of why God wanted to be Israel’s only royalty. The ideas that use us are powerful. They change into gods.
But the story does not slide into unending tragedy. God took Israel’s rejection of Him as king and made of it a means of grace. We read from Luke 2 this morning, that Jesus was born in the City of David. David, you remember, was Israel’s greatest king. But God did not give up on Israel for wanting a king. He sent His Son through David’s legal family line.
The humility of God is evident in this. Do you realize how the prestige of King David’s ancestry added to the prestige of God’s Son, even though God did not want Israel to have a king at all? Using the line of Davidic kings, God once again assumed the position of King over His people.
We love to hear the refrain in Handel’s Messiah, “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. And He shall reign forever and ever.” We think of the charming Christmas story where Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem, King David’s birthplace, as a sign of the fulfillment of God’s promise that his family line would always have a king. How humble of God to regain His place of loving royal authority over His people using their own willfulness, turning it on its head. The King over all kings would come from the line of kings Israel wanted instead of God as their king. No wonder God is at home in a humble and contrite heart. God is humble.
Israel’s history is like a parable. Not only do we see how God worked His purposes out through Israel’s veniality, but God regularly does the same thing with us. Most of you know the remarkable line that Joseph spoke when his father had died and his brothers were afraid that he would use his power to hurt them, getting even for how badly they had treated him as a boy. Joseph said, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
You too may be making choices now motivated only by self-interest. You think to shape your future in keeping with goals that primarily have in mind your own happiness and financial security. Maybe you use people, circumstances, and even God as pawns in your personal game of chess, where you look forward to some glorious checkmate, with you the new and improved Donald Trump.
But maybe in your past there was a time when your parents claimed God’s guiding Holy Spirit for you in presenting you for baptism. Or there was a moment under finer impulses than you now think about when you prayed that God would take your life and let it be consecrated for a high purpose. God has not forgotten what you have forgotten. And God may even now be working with your self-centered choices along the way so that He will accomplish the good through you, in spite of you, that you once asked him to do.
This is the kind of God we worship. This one who took the chaos of unshaped matter and created this glorious world, sees your self-centered confusion as the raw material from which to shape a life of great usefulness and contentment. But do not, for that reason, persist to live selfishly, treating your time, your abilities, your imagination, and your money as though it was yours to squander or use well as you please.
Give your life to God freely. In the end you will see as everyone has always recognized who freely gave themselves to God for His use, that this is the secret of a happy life. It is no secret that a self-indulgent life is a dead-end street. But a life deliberately given over to God is a life of purpose, that satisfies our longing for significance. God is flexible with you, but don’t test his flexibility. Why would you want to? I pray you will give your life to God in deed, and not in word alone.
Let us pray: O Sovereign Lord God, who from the beginning unfolded your loving purposes in this world, take our restless wills and make them freely bend to yours. Allow us the holy confusion of thinking we have freely given to You what has all along been yours—as we will all one day know has been true all along. And all this for your glory as we find our happiness in the center of Your will. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at February 29, 2004 09:30 AM